I plucked Michael Marshall Smith’s 2009 novel The Servants off my TBR shelf — where it has been languishing for a long time no doubt– and was rewarded with a lovely, quiet tale about eleven-year-old Mark who has moved to Brighton with his brand-new step-dad, David, and his mom, who appears to be quite ill. The book reminded me of The Book of Lost Things and A Monster Calls , both five star reads for me.

Mark is wholly unhappy about his new circumstances. Although he’d been to Brighton before, back when his parents were still married, then it had been on holiday where his days had been filled with fun activities. It’s winter now, and cold, and he spends his days trying to learn how to ride his new skateboard down by the beach. He doesn’t like David, “who liked to explain everything” in a weird accent because he had spent so much time living in America. Mark also feels that David has some sort of weird control over his mother and was always “hovering in the background doing whatever it was he always did.”

One day, Mark meets the old lady who lives in the basement apartment.

…she was not so much old as very old, and also a little scary-looking. When she blinked, she looked like a bird, the kind you saw on the seafront, stealing bits of other people’s toast

When she invites him for tea and cake, she shows him an astonishing piece of the house’s history, hidden behind a locked door in her apartment. This is the servants’ quarters and, as it turns out, it is haunted.

The Servants is very much a coming-of-age story. It is about Mark trying to navigate his new world, a world where there is never enough diet Coke in the fridge, and where his understanding of the way life works is skewed by his immaturity therefore elevating his father to a position he clearly does not deserve and casting David in the role of evil step dad.

There was one tiny conversation between David and Mark that reduced me to tears and the metaphor of the servants as the beating heart of a home, who have to work together for anything to be accomplished, was apt.

This one is a heartfelt winner.