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Jessie Greengrass’s debut story collection caught my eye with its delightfully extravagant title, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, but its pleasures were more austere than baroque – and deservedly made it a multiple award-winner The stories broadly divided into two types: those, like the title story, that played on antiquated scientific and historical narrative modes, and those that dug themselves deeper into a wholly subjective experience of the world In these stories, nameless first-person narrators used compulsive self-analysis as much to distance themselves from feeling as to bring themselves closer to any kind of understanding of their lives Greengrass continues both strands of her writing in this, her first novel; you feel that stories from her collection like ‘All the Other Jobs’ or ‘Dolphin’ could easily have evolved into a book such as this, or been sewn into the fabric of this one   SIGHT sets its tone with the decidedly ambivalent opening line: ‘The start of another summer, the weather uncertain but no longer sharply edged, and I am pregnant again’ What follows comes in three parts, each of which focuses on a significant event in the life of the unnamed narrator – a woman living in London with her partner, Johannes, and their young daughter, and, yes, awaiting the birth of their second child – but each of which also folds in the story of a particular intervention in the history of medicine   First, we get the death of the narrator’s mother, some years earlier, and the discovery, in 1895, of the X-ray, by German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen The second section sets off the intricate cross-generational relationship between the narrator, her mother and her maternal grandmother, a Hampstead psychoanalyst, against the equally complex dynamic between Freud and his youngest daughter, Anna, whom he analysed, and who lived on in his London house after his death, nurturing his legacy Lastly, we have the birth of the narrator’s first daughter, and 18th century surgeon John Hunter, who among other things investigated the development of babies in utero   This might seem rather a lot