Little more than a century after the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), another Edinburgh Scot made her novel-writing debut with a book that also deals with the mysteries of human psychology and the cultural implications of modern science. Candia McWilliam "loves ambiguity," she said in an unpublished 5 September 2001 interview with Benjamin G. Lanier-Nabors, and her treatment of mental and social concerns correspondingly evinces her preoccupation with linguistic nuance, moral complexity, the miraculous in the mundane, class relations, and identity--whether sexual, social, or national. Her connections to her Scottish background and her intimate knowledge of the English are also never far removed from her creative work.

Critics have compared McWilliam to such writers as Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, and Iris Murdoch, and her writing has been both praised and criticized for perceived similarities...