ERIC is the unlikeliest of characters to charm a reader. His life is a tabloid drama: man abducts daughter, gets arrested and confesses in a letter to his estranged wife. It is to the credit of Amity Gaige, an American writer, that her third novel, “Schroder”, transforms this thriller plot into a deeply moving tale.

Eric’s story is one of multiple deceptions. At the age of eight, and named Erik Schroder, he landed in America with his father from East Germany. Six years later he assumed the name Eric Kennedy and never minded if people presumed he was related to the slain president. These primordial lies set the stage for his later unravelling. His marriage to Laura, which brought a happiness he hardly dared believe, breaks up when their daughter, Meadow, is four years old. Knowing that divorce will expose his pretence and endanger contact with his child, Eric flees with her into the wooded mountains of northern New York.

The description of the next six days, written by this serial liar, self-inventor and troubled, possibly dangerous man, is riveting. Ms Gaige’s main achievement is to inhabit her protagonist so thoroughly that the reader cannot help but empathise. Eric is by turns insightful, funny, bizarre and irresponsible, at once self-deceiving and self-aware. Explaining his decision to cut and run, he writes: “I couldn’t take it any more, the way the wind went out of the world whenever my daughter left.” In his apologetic, heartfelt voice, the novel becomes an intense, often beautiful meditation on the desperate love of a parent for a child.

Eric regards the kidnapping as a fairy-tale adventure; his daughter, wryly intelligent, is swept along. But Laura’s lawyer accuses him of “bizarre, neglectful parenting”. On the lam he lets Meadow wade into a freezing lake, feeds her junk food and leaves her unattended. The question is not if he will be caught, but how and when.

What distinguishes “Schroder” is its insight and language. Rain is “not rain but the liquid redistribution of collective conflict.” Laura has “such a careful way with the truth”. Ms Gaige excels at landscapes; her writing has the still, clear beauty of a mountain lake. Equally, she understands the terror of potential loss. Eric realises that there is only “one thing that really deranges us and that is the disappearance of love.” Linking too obviously to the symbolism of the cold-war Germany that Eric left behind, with its metaphors of flight and division, is the only misstep. Readers do not need such neat explanations to follow this flawed yet caring father.