The Life Impossible, Matt Haig’s latest work of adult fiction, gets off to a great start when 72-year-old widow Grace abandons her boring suburban life to find out why she’s been bequeathed a house in Ibiza by an old friend who appears to have died in suspicious circumstances. When Grace arrives on the island, she begins to play detective and for the first quarter of the book each chapter brings a new revelation.

The novel is written in first-person present tense, and though Grace’s narration is full of entertaining one-liners such as “He [her husband Karl] had never been much of a conversationalist and being dead had done very little to improve the situation,” being privy to all her thoughts becomes a little taxing.

Around the hundred-page mark the story falls down a supernatural rabbit hole, which isn’t hinted at in the blurb, and what follows are many pages of description. As Grace learns to deal with some newfound abilities, I found myself skim-reading for anything that advanced the plot. That Haig is a competent writer isn’t in dispute, but The Life Impossible doesn’t have the same emotional resonance as his earlier works.