Twelve-year-old Freya is visiting her self-absorbed mother in Cornwall when she meets the 14-year-old twins. “The only thing better than knowing a secret,” they tell her, “is having one of your own.” In the weeks that follow, they will rape her, then bury her alive, a mix of anxiety and annoyance flitting across their faces as they eventually release her from her makeshift coffin.

This might have stood as the shocking centrepiece of a novel, but it’s just one of many terrible events in The Elements, which collects four novellas – published separately between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters negotiate past trauma and try to find peace in the present.

The book’s publication has been overshadowed by the inclusion of Earth, the second novella, on the longlist for the Polari prize for LGBTQ+ writing. In August, most other nominees dropped out in protest at Boyne’s gender-critical views – and this year’s prize has now been cancelled.

Discussion of trans rights is absent from The Elements, although Boyne touches on plenty of big issues. Homophobia, the impact of traditional and social media, parental neglect and sexual violence are all explored. In Water, a grieving woman named Willow moves to a remote Irish island after her husband is jailed for horrific crimes. In Earth, Evan is a footballer on trial as an accessory to rape. In Fire, the adult Freya juggles revenge with her work as a surgeon. And in Air, a father flies to a funeral with his teenage son, and wonders how much to divulge about his family’s past.

Connections abound. We first meet Evan as a boy trying to escape the island of Water. His trial’s jury contains the Freya who reappears in Fire. Aaron, the father from Air, works with Freya and has a child with Willow’s daughter. Supporting characters from one account reappear in cottages, pubs or courtrooms in another.

These plot threads may sound tangled, but Boyne knows how to power a narrative – his 2006 Holocaust drama The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has sold more than 11m copies, and he has been translated into 60 languages. His businesslike prose bristles with thriller-ish hooks: “after all, a doctor in the burns unit should know better than to play with fire”; “the first thing I do when I arrive on the island is change my name”.

Characters are sketched in brief, effective lines: the compassionate Nigerian priest, the troubled pub landlord, the daughter at war with her mother. Some scenes ring with sad power or observational humour: a boy is punched by his father after wetting himself at a football match; a narrow-minded island mother and her Dublin-raised neighbour swap barbs over cups of weak tea.

Boyne’s knack of carrying you wholeheartedly into each narrative gives the return of a character or plot strand from an earlier story a genuine frisson, for the first few times at least. Yet the cumulative effect of it all is numbing, and at times almost comic: trauma is piled on trauma, coincidence on coincidence in a grim farce in which wounded survivors seem doomed to bump into each other again and again for eternity.

If this sounds less like life and more like limbo, that is part of Boyne’s point. These damaged people are weighed down by the crimes they have suffered, caught in patterns of thought and behaviour that churn and spiral and may in turn damage others. Boyne has spoken about the impact of his own experiences of abuse and he describes with sympathy the way his cast negotiate this perilous landscape, reaching out for remedies – isolation, icy sea dips, reconciliation or bracing honesty – that might let light in.

The book’s “elemental” framing isn’t terribly instructive, while the brisk pace means Boyne’s discussion of sexual politics or social media is mostly surface-level. But while The Elements is a flawed work, it’s also a thoroughly readable, victim-focused epic: a welcome riposte to the usual fixation on investigators and perpetrators. Boyne shows how trauma can run through lives and generations, and how time and tenderness can quieten its echoes.

• The Elements by John Boyne is published by Doubleday (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.