Trezza Azzopardi's grim but acclaimed debut, The Hiding Place, charted the disintegration of an immigrant family in 1960s Cardiff.

Here the scene shifts to Norwich but the content remains austere.

Secrets and lies, physical and mental abuse, dominant themes of the earlier work, are back in force. Second time out, however, there is no refuge as ghosts from the past encroach on the twilight of a blighted life.

Remember Me, an account of serial loss and abandonment, opens with a theft.

Elderly vagrant Winnie, eking out her days in a derelict shop, is surprised by an intruder. The next day a dog leaps up and bites her on the face.

It's an apt motif; life has a habit of doing the same. Suicide, madness, abortion, incarceration and incest are among the horrors disinterred as she searches for her stolen possessions. But crucially, Winnie lacks that traditional consolation of age: wisdom.

The redemptive glimmer of the conclusion revealed, amid its backdrop of shooting stars, as only wishful thinking. "Who cares about an old woman with a few bits of tat? No one, that's who, no one in the world," she reasons. In reproaching us for this, Remember Me offers a worthy but unpalatable lesson.

Remember Me, by Trezza Azzopardi is published in hardback by Picador, priced £16.99.