What marks out Chloe Aridjis as a novelist is her ability to create atmospheres and ambiences. These often have hints of the uncanny, but rather than making her writing unsettling they give it an appealing intimacy.

Her fourth novel begins as the narrator Flora visits her parents in Mexico City. Without warning, the family’s Alsatian leaps up and savages her hand. In hospital, she suffers from insomnia and wanders from her room to encounter ‘a mysterious figure’ at the end of a corridor. This turns out to be Wilhelmina, an elderly German patient with pneumonia, who befriends Flora. Wilhelmina collects antique toys and instruments, and Flora becomes fascinated by a magic lantern in her possession. Tragically, Wilhelmina dies suddenly and Flora is asked to deliver her ashes to her son, Max, in London.

Aridjis’s characters appear to lead lives which are more or less mundane, but her descriptions lift them out of the quotidian. Flora works in a jeweller’s shop as a silver polisher, a craft that in Aridjis’s hands becomes intriguing, not to say exotic. ‘Polishing is not an art to be taken lightly,’ Flora tells us. Before her death, Wilhelmina confided to her that Max was ‘a bit adrift’. Flora finds him between jobs and spending much of his time assembling large jigsaw puzzles. She takes the initiative and the development of their relationship lends the novel direction.

Even so, Aridjis has her own approach to narration which eschews linear story-telling. Now and again she pulls us off and away into self-contained vignettes which feel like bonus offerings. One of them is from the point of view of a mouse loose in a library; another from that of a child lost in an art gallery. Other diversions include a description of a postcard of an otherworldly William Blake engraving, as well as the text of an advert in a newsletter for magic lantern slides.

Early in her career Aridjis carried out academic research into magic lanterns, as well as the literature of the fantastic in 19th-century France. While not intrusive, some of this learning underpins the novel. But a brooding presence throughout is the ‘glowing eye’ of Wilhelmina’s magic lantern. With the human subjects of its haunting images long dead, the lantern becomes a focus for the novel’s understated meditation upon mortality. The Shadow of the Object is another quiet triumph for Aridjis.