Candida Crewe is one of the most impressive of the generation of British novelists now in their thirties. Her first novel, written while she was still in her teens, deploys the romantic machinery of gilded youth, glittering beauty, glamorous European travel, and thoroughly requited love. Each of her five successive novels has improved on its predecessor. She told an interviewer, “The foibles, weaknesses, and cruelties of human nature inform my novels and my journalism.” Indeed, she addresses these characteristics lucidly in her fiction, at times with a satirical and humorous approach and on other occasions with a serious realism that demonstrates the importance of carefully observed or imagined details. She is interested in “how very small circumstances in life can have extreme consequences.” Likewise, she uses finely noticed details to build fiction that carries great conviction without sensational events. She writes mostly about female protagonists, and the cruelty...