The Heart Broke in by James Meek: review Despite having written two collections of short stories and four novels - one of which was longlisted for the 2005 Man Booker prize - James Meek does not have the renown he deserves, possibly because he doesn't tend to write the same sort of book twice. The People's Act of Love was a powerful and other-worldly novel about a religious sect in Twenties Siberia; We Are Now Beginning Our Descent was a more personal study of a war reporter seeking salvation from what he's seen in Afghanistan. But in both - and in his latest - his themes are grand and timeless: morality and ethics and how to live and love in a world with - or without - a God. The Heart Broke In is essentially a family saga, but this is no ordinary family, and the novel begins with the death throes of an affair between a middle-aged man and a not-quite-16-year-old girl. Ritchie is a rock star married to Karin, a singer-songwriter and the real talent behind his career. Apart from his penchant for young girls, their life is apparently blissful. Ritchie's sister Bec is a malaria researcher who has made a potentially revolutionary discovery that could help to save millions of lives. The only problem is that it involves injecting a benign parasite that gives the host episodes of blindness. While what she is doing is obviously "good," she does not understand such a concept, and she wonders how it is that one learns it is "bad" to, say, sleep with more than four different men in one week. In the absence of a belief in God and the rules of a church, who is there to tell her this is wrong? Bec is engaged to Val Oatman, the tyrannical editor of a Sunday newspaper who shows her the high life. When she leaves he becomes vengeful, and behind her back threatens Ritchie with revelations about his affair unless he dishes some dirt on Bec. Eventually she is seduced into monogamy by Alex, the drummer in Ritchie's old band and a research scientist, with whom she sets up home in Islington. For a while they are science's golden couple, but it turns out that they cannot conceive. Secrets and surprises of all sorts are revealed when Oatman goes mad and the website he has set up - which blackmails celebrities into making revelations about their fellows in return for silence about their own indiscretions - leaks everything into the public arena, including a list of its sources, so that everybody knows who told what about whom. The fallout is spectacular but cathartic, and brings to an end a wonderfully sharp, intelligently observed and often very funny novel, peopled by a cast of characters slightly too intimidating and cerebral to ring wholly true, but who are never dull. It might be this tendency for restrained and over-analytic characters that keeps Meek from becoming the household name he deserves to be. The Heart Broke In by James Meek 551pp, Canongate, t £13.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £17.99, ebook £11.14)