Fourteen-year-old Edwardian orphan Monica is, if not precisely respectable, at least from a respectable background, in The Night In Venice by AJ Martin (W&N, £22), even though life’s misfortunes have declassed her from Hampstead to the Holloway Road. 

When her reluctant guardian, Driscoll, reluctantly takes her on holiday to Venice, her hopes of glamour and romance are smashed on the first morning when she awakes with a horrible feeling that she might have murdered Driscoll during the night.

Monica’s almost picaresque, slightly dreamlike adventures in Venice put me in mind of Raymond Queneau’s Zazie in the Metro, but the London scenes are more Patricia Highsmith, as we begin to realise this isn’t the first time the damaged child has had cause to worry that she’s done something irreversibly terrible. All in all, though, compelling, disturbing, and very funny, this curious novel is a genuine one-off.