Where Angels Fear to Tread

This novel surprised me. I expected it to be about Lilia, on whose departure it opens, but it was nothing of the sort. Her family (really, in-laws from her first marriage) is deliciously snobby and prudish, of course, and when her brother- and sister-in-law go to Italy to straighten out the man she married and recover the son she left after she dies, things get tricky. Italy is supposed, of course, to change both Caroline Abbot (Lilia's erstwhile companion, whom they meet down there) and Phillip Herritan (her brother-in-law) for the better; At first I was a little unconvinced by the change, but now that I think about it, both characters seem magnificently drawn. These two created the center of the novel for me, (though who wouldn't like Gino, especially in his second appearance), and of course the painful irony of the end is what teaches Phillip perhaps the most telling lesson of all.