Tobias Hill likes mystery. From the subterranean riddles in Underground to the layered ciphers in The Cryptographer, the coded tattoos in Skin to the urban palimpsests of his latest poems, Hill’s work is fixated on the forensic excavation of buried secrets.

It’s fitting, then, that his latest novel is set on an archaeological dig. Ben Mercer, an impressionable and lovelorn academic, escapes Oxford and joins a team quarrying the ruins of Sparta. As well as th4 starse usual relics, he ends up unearthing a plot by his fellow shovel-monkeys; most unexpectedly, Mercer winds up digging up the secrets of his own past. This is a devastating tale of a man on the verge of a breakdown in which Hill ruthlessly uncovers the brutality of both Mercer and his calculating colleagues.

For some, it might seem clumsy, to set a psychological excavation against the backdrop of a real one. But Hill gets away with it thanks to his ability to evoke an alien environment with the deft voice of an expert: in his hands, the dig is not a weak motif but a convincing cradle for a suspenseful narrative.

There are glitches, such as the washed-up academic’s thesis notes, which puncture the plot at intervals for no real reason. These are small weaknesses, however; the psychological story still sparkles. Why did he leave his family? How did he lose his wife? Thanks to Hill’s gracefully compulsive prose, Mercer’s solipsism is riveting.

Patrick Kingsley