Rose Tremain is one of the most important and most celebrated of her generation of British novelists. In 1983 her name appeared in the famous list of the twenty "Best Young British Novelists" published in Granta magazine, alongside those of Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and other promising contemporaries (Tremain, born in 1943, just made it under the cutoff of forty); since then her novels and short-story collections have amply proved her claim to inclusion. Her two most acclaimed books--Restoration (1989) and Music & Silence (1999)--are historical fictions, set in the seventeenth century, and this fact has led some observers to think of her as an historical novelist. She resists this characterization, telling Helen de Bertodano in a 23 January 2000 interview in The Sunday Telegraph (London): "A historical novel implies that everything you're going to read is safely in the past so you don't need to think...