This is the story of a dinner party, a knot of people with pasts and connections which at first seem few but are later found to be many … The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and all the time the ice on which the protagonists’ world rests is being thinned from beneath by boiling emotions and ugly motives … No living writer handles the tension between formality of expression and the subversiveness of thought more elegantly’ Candia McWilliam, Independent on Sunday