In Maiden Names, a landscape, and its animals, people, ghosts, are pinned down, probed and revealed in sharp, often witty language. A whole authentic society whose citizens include souterrains and badgers, nurses and handball-players, is held steady in an unpredictable but convincing vision, where the ‘pike swims under the otter and the otter dives into the moon’ and a psychic refuses to tell his bodyguard about his visions at Knock.”