What happens when you try to find not only meaning but pattern and form in seventy years of a life? It's not a simple process of chronological remembering. It entails a Remake, to capture not facts but the contents of those facts, the feelings of a war-time child, the textures of her clothing, tastes and smells, her mother, an absent father, a gradual transformation into adulthood. The facts are simple enough: birth in Geneva; a bilingual childhood in Brussels, then London and Liverpool; work in Intelligence at the Bletchley Park decoding centre during the war; marriage; Oxford; London; literary journalism; the emergence of the novelist. But what do the facts add up to?

Remake is an autobiographical novel with a difference. It uses life material to compose a third- person fiction, transformed in an experiment whose tensions are those of memory -- distorting and partial -- checked by a rigorous and sceptical language which probes and finds durable forms underlying the wayward impulses and passions of the subject. Remake is a work of fascinating originality by one of our finest modern novelists.