Tomorrow
by Graham Swift
248pp, Picador, £16.99

"You're asleep, my angels, I assume." Paula lies awake in the hours before dawn and silently addresses her twin children, who have recently turned 16. It is the night before they are to hear some vital family news, and Paula is full of all the things that mothers never do tell their children - important things about the lovemaking that did, or did not, make them. Not that there is anything too shameful to relate. "Your father got into bed with me one night in Brighton nearly 30 years ago and, though the place and the room and the bed have changed from time to time, he's never got out." He sleeps beside her now, not like a husband or a lover, but like a man "on the eve of his execution".