Usually on New Year’s Day, I’m either stuck like glue to something cosy (Dodie Smith, Angela Thirkell) or, if I’m at my sister’s house, I’m perusing my father’s beloved facsimile of Gamage’s Christmas Bazaar 1913 (an endlessly fascinating and occasionally appalling catalogue of gifts from the famous London department store).

This year, however, neither cosiness nor Heath Robinson-style illustrations of Edwardian toys seem to be what I need. Working on the basis that like repels like, I’ve been warding off gloomy times with what I can only describe as more darkness. The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère came out in 2000. It’s a work of nonfiction written in the searching, empathetic style of a novel about one of France’s most notorious killers, Jean-Claude Romand, who in 1993 murdered his wife, Florence, their two small children, Antoine and Caroline, and his elderly parents. Romand’s plan had been that, having done this terrible work, he would set fire to the family home in which he would die himself. But he failed to make this happen. Three years later he was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 22 years.

So far, so ugly. The greater part of The Adversary, however, is devoted to Romand’s life before these events – or, to be accurate, to the absence of one. For he was not so much a man as an abyss. His wife, parents and friends believed that, a man of talent and means, he worked as a doctor at the World Health Organisation. But he did not even have a medical degree.

When he was supposed to be at the organisation’s Geneva HQ, he would sit in his car; when he was meant to have travelled abroad to a conference, he would spend his time holed up in an airport hotel. His entire existence was a fiction, a fabric of falsehoods so long-standing that his every waking moment was a kind of endurance test, his stomach always roiling, his sinews braced for discovery. It would be excessive to claim this as a book for our times. But it is one that makes the reader think hard about lies and their consequences, both for those who must hear them, and for those out of whose mouths they spill with such abandon.

The Adversary is published by Bloomsbury (£9.99)