By Jonathan Coe. Knopf, 256 pp, $27.95, hardcover

Maybe it’s a good thing that The Rain Before It Falls is relatively short as novels go, because once you begin reading it all sense of time will disappear and you’ll become useless regarding all the other things you’re supposed to be doing. Hey, who would have guessed that a novel structured around a British woman and her two daughters listening to hours of audiotape on which an elderly, dying aunt describes 20 family photographs to an intended recipient—a mysterious second cousin once removed—could be so thoroughly mesmerizing?

Much-lauded London-based author Jonathan Coe (The Rotters’ Club) usually flaunts a satirical bent, but here masterminds drama that begins with two young cousins and an intriguing mystery, then morphs into a gripping, devastating story of mothers and daughters. The appealing, unflinching narrator—fuelled by whisky and French folk recordings charged with erotic, personal import—is 73-year-old lesbian Rosamond, who became “blood-sisters” with her lonely cousin Beatrix when young Rosamond was evacuated from Birmingham to her uncle’s farm during World War II.

“It is the story of me and Beatrix I am meant to be telling, me and Beatrix and how that all leads, inevitably, to you,” Rosamond confides on tape. The “you” is Beatrix’s granddaughter, Imogen, whom Rosamond has not seen for 20 years. But the intricately breathtaking story Coe gives Rosamond to tell only begins with the unhappy young Beatrix, who was the victim of an emotionally abusive mother. (“Ivy’s was the cruelty of indifference.”) Tragedy cycles forward as Beatrix goes on to damage her own daughter Thea, who herself commits a horrific crime upon her own child, Imogen.

But Coe isn’t just fascinated by family saga; there are love stories here, and deep loneliness. Of a too-brief holiday she, her lover, and a young Thea spent in France, Rosamond recalls “the cerulean blueness of the lake; Rebecca and Thea; and me, walking across the meadow to join them”. And when the other “listeners”—niece Gill and her daughters Catherine and Elizabeth—feel a connectedness over Rosamond’s memory of two little cousins “running away from home, on a winter’s night in wartime Shropshire”, we’re reminded that good mother-daughter relationships are abiding and cyclical too.