Using rock-climbing as a metaphor for life’s challenges, defeats and successes sounds like a trite idea. One would assume, therefore, that a novel that placed this metaphor at its centre would end up trite or contrived or both. It’s testament to Allegra Goodman’s capacity to capture the delicate, diamond-hard interiority of her eponymous protagonist that Sam ends up making the reader feel the paradoxical combination of familiarity and originality that only a great author can create.

Sam is a bildungsroman fundamentally simple in its conception. Sam begins the novel aged seven, and we follow the milestones of her life until she embarks on a new adventure at 19. Once again, a sketch of Sam’s circumstances might seem cliché: Sam is not born into privilege; her mother, Courtney, is a young single mother with frustrated ambitions and children by two different – and differently flawed – men. Sam is elder sister to Noah, two at the novel’s opening, who suffers from behavioural difficulties necessitating multiple school changes and ongoing medication. Sam is withdrawn, first idolising her father (Mitchell, a kind, sometimes wise, travelling magician, poet, one-man-band who specialises in personal disappearances, broken promises, and ‘lies about the future’) then judging and rejecting him. In high-school, Sam becomes ‘a lonely molecule’, never fitting in, never excelling, semi-accidentally falling into a relationship with a guy she doesn’t ever really like.

Her freeing hope lies in climbing. Sam’s father identifies her talent when he sees her climbing door jambs aged seven. A trip to a climbing gym sparks a life-long relationship with the sport, one that brings learning and triumph, fury and heartbreak, regret and redemption. (Sounds lamely saccharine, right? Trust me, it’s not.)

Ultimately, Goodman creates a moving and resonant portrayal of maternal love and frustration, of the struggle and vicarious dreaming involved in giving everything and wanting everything for your children. At the same time, Sam’s inner life emerges in her journey from finding safety in never being known (as a little girl, she realises that ‘imagination is private! You don’t use your actual imagination for homework’), through wrestling with her love for and obligation to her mother and brother, to her final act of innocent self-revelation and decision that hits the reader because it is so small as to be truly noble.

Coming-of-age are three words that can be used to sell everything from cheesy Hallmark Channel movies to some of the greatest works of art our culture has produced. Sam isn’t the latter, but it’s a lot closer to the second pole on the spectrum than the former.