BOUGAINVILLEA HOUSE By Kalpana Swaminathan Penguin Price: Rs 395 Pages: 346

Unconventional versions of reality have been a leitmotif of sorts for Mumbai-based doctor-writer Kalpana Swaminathan. In Jaldi and Friends, her deliciously wicked romp of a children's story, we are treated to a stray puppy's view of the Mumbai underworld. And in Ambrosia for Afters, her well-received first novel, the writer (who also writes under the pseudonym Kalpish Ratna) introduces us to the two worlds of the 10-year-old Tenral. Two imaginative worlds in which past and present, fiction and fairy tale coalesce. As Tenral says, "A double life needn't mean Jekyll and Hyde. One could be Jekyll in both. Or even Hyde. That isn't the issue."

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Bougainvillea House, Swaminathan's latest offering, is an intricately constructed psychological thriller that brings most of these themes together. Clarice Aranxa is a pernickety old woman of Portuguese descent ("I like a lace doily on the tea tray, a rose in season, the newspaper crisp as toast") and she has been diagnosed as dying of motor neuron disease. So her devoted daughter Marion ships her from Bombay to Bougainvillea House in Goa to rest.

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This is when a bizarre back and forth begins. Based on a complex web of relationships in Clarice's life-her late husband Clive ("A queue of suitors a mile long and I had to marry a man who sweats like a pig, I used to tell him bitterly"), her daughters Marion and Melissa ("I raised my daughters to understand that that sort of thing is for the lower classes ... the lower classes are hot-blooded"), her maid Pauline and the mysterious Clive look-alike Dr Justin-a sinister story begins to emerge. The narrative moves from the confessions of Clarice to 38-year-old Marion's italicised despair. Neurologist Liaqat Ali Khan documents the curious case as well. Pauline speaks and so does Sister Abby.

Secrets, lies, a dysfunctional family and differing perspectives. Fashionably Faulkner, all right. Swaminathan writes with ease-of the world "washed and ironed, happy as a party dress" and of "my scream trailed, electric blue, jagged as lightning". At times, she stumbles over stuff like "Bad feelings are like wearing a tight bra" or "Truth is a cliff at sunset", but that is just the occasional literary leap that does not quite make it.

For the rest, Bougainvillea House, with its many tumultuous twists and turns, is a gripping book. You may not like sanctimonious Clarice, who is more caricature than character, but like Khan, the good doctor, you are almost driven to discover the truth of her story. And in doing so, to think about the past and its power and also to engage with the terrible potential of emotions like repression and revenge. Makes for compulsive reading.