A Stone’s Throw by Fiona Shaw (Serpent’s Tail, £7.99)

FIONA Shaw was lying awake in bed one night racking her brains for ideas for her next novel when two stories she’d been told years earlier came back to her.

One had been told to her by a friend. It involved the friend’s brother, when he was a boy. He’d gone sailing a dinghy in a reservoir with a companion, and as they were carrying the boat back afterwards, there was an accident involving an overhead power cable. “They both survived, but they were very badly hurt,” Fiona says.

The second story was one she was told, 20 years or so ago, by an elderly woman.

It was 1941, wartime, and the woman – she was young then – was on a ship sailing across the Atlantic to Kenya, where she was to marry her fiancé.

The boat was bombed, and the survivors had to pile into lifeboats.

“As often happens, they couldn’t get all the lifeboats away. So the boats were more crowded than they should have been,” Fiona says.

What really lived in the woman’s mind, however, was what happened next.

She was the only woman in a lifeboat full of men. The survivors quickly decided they had to organise themselves, and make arrangements for eating, sleeping – and going to the toilet. Because the boat was so cramped, it was decided a bucket would be passed around for the latter purpose.

The woman was horrified at the thought of having to perform her ablutions in front of all these men. “And she decided in her mind that if they hadn’t been rescued by nightfall, she would rather put herself over the side and drown than have to pee in the sight of all the men. It would have been so shameful and humiliating for her,” Fiona says.

The fact that the woman was telling her the story, years later, was proof that she did, indeed, survive. “But when she was telling me the story, it was clear that she would have done it.”

Extraordinary, what shame and a sense of what is and is not appropriate can drive us to do.

These two very different stories congealed in Fiona’s mind, and gave her the kernel of her novel, A Stone’s Throw, which comes out in paperback on Thursday.

It is, in part, about the interconnectedness of things: about how events that happen to one person can ripple through the lives of others, even down the generations.

The novel opens with a haunting scene in which a father and son leave their home for an ‘adventure’. The power of it is as much about what is not said as about what is. Father and son are clearly poor, and living somewhere rural and remote. And clearly, something is not quite right. The boy, Will, doesn’t really want to go with his father, and breaks away, determined to run home to his mother. It’s snowing, the landscape clothed in white. The boy runs out on to a pristine surface of flat, white snow – not realising it is ice. Come back, the father roars after him. “It’s not safe! You could fall through!”

The book switches abruptly to the 1940s, wartime, and a convoy sailing for Africa. A young woman, Meg, is sailing to meet her fiancé. It gradually becomes clear that she is Will’s sister.

And it becomes clear, too, that she is getting married not for love, but to escape her past; and the confines of her life and the small village in which she grew up. But are these reasons enough for her to cross an ocean to be with a man she scarcely knows, and doesn’t love? And how will the choices she is making now affect her own son, William?

Fiona, a mother of two in her forties who lives in Clementhorpe and is occasionally to be spotted writing away on her laptop in the Pig & Pastry or in the reading café in Rowntree Park, says the novel’s title comes from her love of skimming stones.

Like a stone that skims across water, her novel touches down at five separate points in the lives of three generations of a family. Only Meg is present throughout (apart from in that first scene). But the book’s title aims to capture the way in which all the lives and all the points in the story are connected.

“There are really five different stories. They begin in the 1920s and end in the 1980s, but I wanted to capture the sense that what happens in the opening stories is just a stone’s throw from what happens later.”

Like a stone thrown into water, our actions cause ripples, she says. Those ripples grow fainter as the years pass: but the echoes of them are still there generations later.

A Stone’s Throw was first published in large format paperback last year – and it has won widespread critical praise.

“A touching and poignant tale of lost opportunities,” said the Good Book Guide.

“As subtle and delicate as gossamer… a masterclass in restraint,” added David Evans in the Financial Times.

And so it is.

• A Stone’s Throw by Fiona Shaw is published in paperback by Serpent’s Tail on Thursday, priced £7.99