Sarah Moss is one of our country’s most underrated writers. Her last novel, Bodies of Light, published last year, was a rich concoction of a historical novel and psychological drama, layered with gory Victorian medical detail, fraught mother-daughter relationship, workhouse misery and prostitution. It has stuck in my mind ever since I read it — and now, in Signs for Lost Children, we have the sequel.
But let me set the scene: in Bodies of Light we’re in late 19th-century Manchester where husband and wife Alfred and Elizabeth are making their life together. He is the city’s foremost painter and a progressive thinker while she has devoted her life to helping less fortunate women and those who have fallen into prostitution. While the