‘My parents were liars,’ the narrator Ruthie says at the beginning of Sarah Manguso’s unsettling debut novel. Looking back on her abusive childhood in a New England town near Boston in the 1980s, she recounts how her father wore a fake Rolex that didn’t work, and her narcissistic mother was obsessed with social climbing, pinning the wedding announcements of local Mayflower descendants on the fridge as if she knew them. Ruthie observes everything in high definition, from her parents’ neglect (‘I have no memories of being held’) to their naked bodies flopping on top of each other while they all share the same bed. In a disturbing scene, her mother, who seems to have been traumatised by her own upbringing, asks her elementary school daughter to spell the f-word.

Manguso excels at capturing the perspective of a child desperate for the love of people who don’t know how to give it. When Ruthie gets braces, her mother pulls puffy-lipped faces at her. ‘She wanted me to know I was ugly,’ Ruthie decides. ‘She was helping me get ready for the world.’

The novel’s backdrop simmers with menace. The gravestones of dead children are ‘gray, crooked teeth inscribed with little lambs and angels’, and autumn brings the ‘slap-clatter of crows’. Rumours spread about the town’s police officer, who molests a boy by ‘accident’. The suffocating societal pressures of growing up as a female in America are also carefully drawn. By the sixth grade, the girls peel off their fingernails, and Ruthie’s pockets are stuffed with paper napkins containing unswallowed meals. ‘I don’t dress for myself; I dress for boys,’ one schoolfriend tells Ruthie; we find out later that ‘she woke up in a strange place, bleeding’.

Manguso’s non-fiction books – Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015) and 300 Arguments (2017), in particular – are known for their verse-like use of white space and text. Very Cold People is also made up, to powerful effect, of poised, cumulative fragments. Gaps swell uncomfortably with unsaid, secretive, confusing horrors, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks with their own imagination. In one vignette, Ruthie notices that her friend’s father lets himself into the bedroom where the girls are playing, and ‘looked at me and smiled and said, Having fun?’ After a blank space, Ruthie recalls the red umbrella with tiny white dots she was given for her birthday.

‘You can learn to eat violence,’ Ruthie thinks. Her town, full of ‘very cold people’, serves as proof that we can’t.