This rich plum pudding of a novel is an intellectual and aesthetic feast. It begins in the last years of the 19th century and centers around charming, aloof, and curiously passive Olive Wellwood, a writer of children’s books, who lives in studied rusticity at a retreat called Todefright with her philandering husband and several children . As a gift to them, she writes a fantasy story about each of her children, who grow up to very different destinies, some of them tragic. The family network includes a cluster of artists and progressive thinkers who reflect the influx of new ideas—such as Fabian Socialism, Arts and Crafts aesthetics, and the Woman Question—that are having an impact on English life. Byatt is marvelous at depicting the feel of the times and the simultaneous lives of several different characters, and unsurpassed at gorgeous sensuous description. This is one of the most satisfying novels by anybody in years.

The grace and expressiveness of the writing in her latest novel reveal Eva Hoffman's considerable intellect at work. Hoffman is the author of one of the finest memoirs of recent years, Lost in Translation, which was all about learning to think in a new language, and her care for words is just as evident here. The novel centers around concert pianist Isabel Merton, whose success has condemned her to the lonely and disruptive life of the international concert circuit. She keeps bumping into an attractive, intruiging, intense man named Anzor, an exile from his native Chechnya who is passionate about its fate. His political intensity matches her own intensity about music, and the two are deeply drawn to each other. As she--and-we--learn more about him, a life-threatening incident changes everything, and precipitates a profound crisis for Isabel.  Read this book for the beauty, intelligence and precision of the writing, and for the portrait --all too seldom seen in fiction--of a woman in the throes of an impersonal  passion for her art.