Jude Cook's Time Being: a philosopher, a murder and midlife in pieces

Jude Cook's third novel, Time Being, opens with a philosophy professor waiting in a toilet cubicle for her ex-lover to shoot her through the door. Someone else dies instead. Salt publishes the book at £10.99.

The professor is Esther Luck, who teaches philosophy in London and has ovarian cancer. The cubicle she has chosen, on the fifth floor of her university building, is the only one without CCTV. Michel, her dodgy French ex, has agreed to end her misery. But Laura arrives first — the department's fragrant superstar, with her BBC presenting gig and handsome barrister husband. Michel gets the wrong door. Esther is left guilty, panicked and alone as Laura's blood pools on the floor.

Cook is less interested in the violent drama than in the existential questions that follow. His debut, Byron Easy, followed a poet mulling over his frustrated life on a train. Its successor, Jacob's Advice, tracked two cousins discussing Europe, identity and terrorism. True to form, Time Being settles quickly into Esther's thoughts.

What does a botched death change for Esther?

Everything and nothing. She gives a lecture on autopilot and deflects police questions, then sits in her Crouch End flat and walks in the nearby park, alone with her guilt and sorrow. Steroids have left her heavy and listless. Radiotherapy has given her permanent nerve damage and agonising cystitis. She is crushed by her menopause and has few friends. Her career once offered fulfilment and security; now the philosophy department faces savage cuts, and an academic who can barely function sits in the firing line.

The police investigation seems to be going nowhere fast. Chinks of light appear in Esther's purgatory: good news from her doctor, an unexpected romance, a chance of a book deal. She hammers out Every Grain of Sand, an introduction to philosophy that is also a memoir. Her agent calls it "a book I just know women will identify with".

Her eye for the world stays wonderfully vivid throughout. The new year finds "spring crouching under the churned soil". On a rare holiday to a country house hotel, she opens her eyes to the stars and basks in the universe.

What remains tainted?

Nothing is entirely clean. One October morning, visiting her mother's grave under "a blaze of majestic bronze and apricot" foliage, she finds freshly painted swastikas on the stones of the Jewish cemetery. The police return every few months to ask leading questions and sit thoughtfully in her book-lined office. And Michel — wild, charismatic — has not simply vanished.

Like any good philosopher, Esther ponders it all. Is life "just one damn thing after another"? Is she a "temporal husk of flesh, or something else"? She turns to Boethius, Kant, Arendt, Weil and De Beauvoir, and finds little solace. These philosophical asides end up feeling like the book's flimsiest part. The rest is better and more focused, and while the juicy melodrama of Laura's murder and the bleak mundanity of an unhappy life may seem an uncomfortable marriage, Cook brings his strands together with confidence.

Throughout, details and feelings power the novel: the heavy silence of the clinic's waiting room, the happy buzz of an unexpected date, the practised rhythm of a lecture. Esther is a fine, acutely observed creation — at times thoroughly sympathetic, at others grimly evasive, and all the more credible for it. You do not have to like her to share her dread at the trauma she endures and the brutal decisions she faces.

The result is a fine portrait of a wounded midlife, as seasons shift and hope and happiness roll by, glorious but fleeting, like clouds in a turbulent sky. Readers who take it on will find a novel that asks, without flinching, whether a bruised life is still worth living.