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A tale of desire and middle age, of deceit and longing, Apple Tree Yard shows that people, no matter how middle class or conservative, can act in surprising and often brutal ways.

Yvonne Carmichael is a middle-class woman with a comfortable middle-class life. That is how she likes it – until she is seduced by an enigmatic and dangerous man who likes sex in risky places and whom she is incapable of resisting. Yvonne knows it isn’t forever, that to him she is just another woman in a long line of women, but the excitement, the ability to step out of her safe life, to be someone else if even for a few minutes, is bewitching. Then something brutal and unimaginable happens and how these lovers deal with it threatens to unmask their secret and destroy their lives.

Apple Tree Yard opens in the middle of a trial, at the moment when Yvonne knows they have lost. Why she is on trail, who is her co-accused and what it is they have lost unfolds over the next three hundred pages. Doughty uses foreshadowing to great effect. It is this hinting at what happened, at what is to unfold throughout the novel, that keeps you reading through what seems at times tedious detail. It is tempting to skip ahead, particularly if (like me) you are not a fan of courtroom drama, yet contained within the detail are clues to the truth.

Doughty is a skillful writer. She takes us inside Yvonne’s life and inside her head. Yvonne narrates the story from its aftermath as if confessing her innermost thoughts to the man referred to as ‘You’ throughout most of the novel. The courtroom scenes are used as anchors, revealing just enough to draw on what Yvonne has already exposed through her narrative and moving the story forward by foreshadowing what Yvonne will relate next. This gives Yvonne’s narrative a veracity that could easily be called into question, for her behaviour with ‘You’ is so out of character it is easy to believe it never happened. Apple Tree Yard is the city courtyard where Yvonne and her lover engage in an act that will ultimately be their undoing. Though it may once have contained apple trees, there is no sign of this in the bleak cobbled space surrounded by buildings and often busy with foot traffic. That its name bears no resemblance to reality is thematic of this novel that shows humans as both more complex and brutal than they appear.

This somewhat discomforting portrait of a conventional woman drawn into an illicit affair showcases Doughty’s ability to inhabit the world of her character. How we respond to Yvonne and her actions will be coloured by our own life experiences and moral code, but however you feel about her, this is a novel that will haunt you long after it is finished.

Apple Tree Yard is one of those books that prove Doris Lessing’s argument that you should read a book at the right time for you. I started reading this novel when it was first released in Australia in early 2014 but found the opening courtroom scene too heavy going at that time and set it aside. Since picking it up again I have come to appreciate this novel and Dougherty’s skill. So much so that I’ve since purchased another of her novels.