Mitz serves as an ingenious framing device, a sort of roving awareness perched lightly on the Woolfian hearth. A close-quarters Intimism reigns. There are wonderfully burnished scenes of Virginia and Leonard reading Shakespeare beside the fire, teas with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and even a visit from the surprisingly affable Eliot, who, having been bitten by Mitz, asks, “How shall I hold the little marmoset, if you devour first one of my hands, then the other?” The novel makes of Bloomsbury a kind of snow globe—diminutive, self-contained, beautifully agitated—within which major and minor figures are given room to float past at their leisure.

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