The Violets of March

The novel opens with a bittersweet scene: as Emily tapes up the last box, Joel nearly takes her beloved book with him; then he locks the door from outside as he leaves — 'he still cares about my safety'. Emily remembers the end of her marriage by the smell of burnt hot-sauce omelette; small, concrete details like this are Jio's strength. As she signs the divorce papers in a restaurant, her best friend Annabelle explains a funny theory based on her doctoral research: the lifespan of a marriage is determined by the husband's name. 'Joel — seven years, two weeks.' This humour nicely balances the novel's melancholy tone.

Emily's creative block is convincing too: her first novel, written eight years ago, was a bestseller and was filmed, but ever since she has stared at a blank screen every morning. Annabelle urges her to write about something she genuinely cares about, and Emily thinks of her mother's aunt Bee. A childhood memory — a photo hung high in the hallway of young Bee on a beach while another woman whispers in her ear — and a painting Bee once gave her become the key to the plot: the woman in the painting is Bee, but the curly, dark-haired man holding her hand is not Uncle Bill.

The arrival on the island shows Jio's gift for description: the ferry, the salty smell of Puget Sound, the shingled houses along the shore, Bee's green 1963 Volkswagen driven at speed without a working seatbelt. Eighty-five, still dressing as if she were in her twenties, pouring wine into a coffee cup and calling it 'my medicine', Bee is the novel's liveliest character. The warm welcome and the gin sipped in silence by the fire give the book a comfortable, cosy rhythm.

On the beach Emily meets the neighbour Henry: the island's stone-skipping 'champion' (his record is fourteen), an old man who still keeps on his mantelpiece a photo of the fiancée he failed to marry sixty years ago. At his house the neighbour Jack appears — tall, a little shy, walking the beach with his dog Russ — and invites Emily to dinner on Saturday. But Bee, having watched them from the window, issues a brief warning: 'Be careful. Especially with Jack.' She won't say why. It neatly establishes the novel's 'everyone on this island has a secret' motif.

In the fourth chapter, in the market's wine cellar, Emily runs into her teenage love Greg, who also asks her out to dinner. Here the novel's weakness shows: within a few chapters two handsome single men cross the heroine's path, and the love triangle falls into a very familiar pattern. Even so, Emily's inner monologue — the embarrassment of meeting an old flame in rubber boots and a shabby wool sweater — is honest and funny.

The real engine of the novel, though, is the diary. The first page of the red velvet notebook found in the pink guest room reads 'draft book', and then, in beautiful handwriting, 'The Story of What Happened on a Small Island in 1943'. A married woman — Esther — writes about meeting a man called Elliot and how her husband Bobby never held her like that. These passages are the most gripping part of the book and compel the reader, like Emily, to keep going 'just one more page'. The Turkish translation reads smoothly.

• Two timelines: March 2005 and a diary from 1943
• First-person narration with a candid, humorous inner monologue
• Strong sense of place: the island, the beach, the old house
• Each chapter ends on a small secret or question