Be prepared for an exhilarating ride and a dollop of Irish warmth with this imaginative novel, part thriller, part family mystery.

Care worker Maud Drennan is sent to sort out Cathal Flood, an unwashed, eccentric giant of a man living in West London, his large house and garden seemingly filled with junk of all kinds. This ranges from a wall of National Geographic magazines in the downstairs hall, beyond which Maud is forbidden to wander, to a neglected garden full of dismembered bicycles, eviscerated mattresses and abandoned batteries.

Cathal is the hoarder of the novel’s title, an Irish artist who flies into rages and who saw the previous carer off.

Maud gradually creates some order in a few rooms, sorts out a fox and the myriad cats that live on the property, and begins to examine some of the house’s secrets.

There’s a whiff of Irish mysticism about the story, as well as a good deal of magic realism, with a retinue of saints visible only to Maud. They do not advance the story greatly but provide a good deal of entertainment. St Dymphna chews the end of her plait and likes dirty limericks; St Valentine, walleyed and with only three teeth in his head, gives wry advice about her life; and St George rattles his armour when alarmed.

Maud has an agoraphobic, amateur criminologist landlady – born a man but now favouring full make-up, elaborate scarves or wigs and drifting kaftans, – who’s fascinated by the death of Cathal Flood’s wife and a probable link between the decaying mansion and the disappearance of a teenage girl in Dorset.

In some chapters Maud remembers the disappearance of her own sister in Ireland many years before, and at the novel’s end she’s off to find her … but without the saints.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville