Hila Blum’s English-language debut opens with a scene of domestic harmony, as two young sisters and their parents sit down to dinner in a book-filled house in a Netherlands suburb. What changes everything is the fact that we’re viewing it through the eyes of a woman who is standing across the street, thousands of miles from home and hidden by darkness, glimpsing her grandchildren for the first time. It’s also the first time in six years that she has seen the girls’ mother, her only child, and the spectre of what could have gone so shatteringly wrong between them drives a mesmerising, disquieting tale of family estrangement.
The woman watching is Yoella, Blum’s narrator, and after she returns to Israel, the novel charts her efforts to understand why her daughter Leah has shut her out of her life. In this respect, How to Love Your Daughter is a kind of mystery, in which Yoella is sleuth and prime suspect. Leah’s father, Meir, has died so there are no witnesses, and in the search for clues, Yoella can only rake over her memories, interrogating “day-to-day mishaps” or the bouts of depression that made her withdraw from Leah on occasion. None of it seems to explain the rift.
While there is no hint of melodrama, Blum is a virtuoso at stoking unease. Yoella notes, for instance, that throughout their marriage, Meir loved her in a “fatherly, almost medical way”. There’s also the sense of anxiety that Yoella recalls feeling when Leah became a teenager. “How carelessly girls are cornered into being women,” she observes.
Something did go awry for Leah in school, and if Yoella wasn’t to blame, then her love for her daughter made things worse. “Everything I ever did, I did out of love”, she insists, and the truth of that statement – that love steered things so horribly off course – will send shivers down the spine of any parent.
The ending is not without hope, yet the earlier decisions the protagonist makes only add to the psychological complexity of this unforgettable book.
• How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum (translated by Daniella Zamir) is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
