Something tells me I shouldn’t like ‘The Chaperone’. I’m suspicious of any novel that uses real people; it seems like an off-the-shelf solution to character development akin to a restaurant buying-in ready meals instead of cooking their own dishes. And the plot – of Kansas housewife Cora confronting her past and learning about life beyond her closeted existence – is too redolent of middle-aged women’s beach-towel fiction, with a dash of family saga thrown in.

But Laura Moriarty is such a skilled novelist that The Chaperone transcends genre. I picked it up with modest expectations, but within a few pages (and several times thereafter) I found myself thinking, “This is actually very good.”

Cora, an ordinary-seeming housewife with nothing to do for the summer, agrees to chaperone 15-year old Louise Brooks from their home town of Wichita to New York, where Louise is to join the dance school that will set her on the road to stardom. Louise is far too liberated already, while Cora is strait-laced – a willing prisoner of Mid-Western mores. But Louise becomes the prisoner of her liberated values, while Cora liberates herself from her past. It’s really a feminist novel about the discovery of identity.

Moriarty cleverly weaves the women’s secret histories into the story. Cora’s would have shocked 1920s Mid-Western society, while Louise’s is shocking even today. She doesn’t go overboard on the period detail, which helps make this literary fiction rather than a genre novel, with Moriarty developing Cora’s character with a deft touch. It works because Moriarty handles the suspense of the narrative brilliantly while allowing Cora’s story to take hold of the reader’s imagination ahead of the superficially more glamorous Louise.

If I’ve got a criticism, it’s that the book has a long tail after that cataclysmic summer is over, becoming in the final quarter a saga of social changes over the next eighty years. But Moriarty has developed the characters so well that we care about them enough already and will follow them into this new territory. I imagine this book will be popular among (largely female) reading groups. It’s not a genre I’d normally choose, so the fact that I was entranced from the very first page is high praise indeed.