You’d expect the death of a son to be an emotionally devastating blow for a family. Not for the aristocratic Asters, living the life of idle gentry on their private island of Mount Sorcha. For the Asters have their own grief nurse, a young woman called Lynx, whose psychic powers can take away their sorrow, leaving them bright and chipper to welcome the guests to what would have been their son Sculptor’s engagement party but will now serve as his wake.

In the world of Angie Spoto’s debut novel, grief nurses are an elite status symbol. They allow the rich to go through life untroubled by negative emotions like sadness, anguish or heartbreak. Hanging on to one’s grief is considered bad form, and those who have a grief nurse can’t imagine how anyone copes without one.

Distinguished by their white hair and pale eyes, grief nurses are snatched from their parents and isolated in special schools, later to be farmed out into what basically amounts to indentured servitude, paraded as trophies and passed down like heirlooms.

Lynx has lived on Mount Sorcha for 12 years, relieving the family members of their grief since the age of ten. Revered but unloved, gifted with an extraordinary ability that makes people afraid to touch her, given intimate access to the Asters’ emotions but bedding down in the servants’ quarters at night, Lynx feels understandably detached from the human race. But her interior life is full of wonder and intense sensation. The lonely Lynx can escape to a landscape inside herself where the source of her power resides, and her clients’ grief, as she hungrily devours it, manifests itself in symbolic forms: as a rose, for example, a crow or a blade. Often, she can see them in the real world, such as those times when a snake will become visible wrapped around Ms Aster’s arm.

As the late Sculptor’s wake begins, his fiancée, the flamboyant Vela Deleporte, makes her entrance. To everyone’s dismay, she has brought Sculptor’s grief nurse, assuming that her guardianship will now pass to the Asters. Older, assured, enigmatic, Karina is the first grief nurse Lynx has seen since she was a child, and she doesn’t know quite what to make of her. Is she a threat or a potential ally? How will her arrival affect Lynx’s relationship with the Asters’ daughter, with whom she is secretly and hopelessly in love, and who has a shameful secret of her own?

Originally from Chicago, Angie Spoto got her PhD in Creative Writing in Glasgow and continues to live in Scotland, her adopted home clearly inspiring the island of Mount Sorcha. The world outside it is purely the product of her imagination: a vaguely Edwardian alternate timeline she could have explored further, in which same-sex marriage is commonplace but using hot-water pipes to heat a greenhouse counts as cutting-edge technology. Her world-building only falters when it comes to the people known as Faders, whose nature is never really quite clear, despite their relevance to Lynx’s story.

Lynx herself is a compelling, if introspective and distant, character. Possessed of incredible abilities, she is nevertheless at the mercy of the events taking place around her, and yearns to be free to choose her own destiny and follow her heart.

Elements of magic realism and shades of gothic romance enshroud her journey of self-discovery in an aura of enchantment and infinite possibilities, and her dawning realisation that human beings need grief if they are to feel fully alive is tracked by some beautiful passages steeped in rich imagery.