Berenice

John Matravers has built his reputation on merciless wit and pristine taste. A poet-philosopher-man-about-town who writes critical notices for London papers, he enters a drab West End theater one evening expecting easy prey: a Norwegian play by some minor dramatist, performed in a third-rate house. He has already composed his devastating review in his head. Then Berenice appears. By the second act, everything Matravers believed about theater, about women, about his own impenetrable cynicism, lies in ruins. She is the same woman he has been watching from across Hyde Park for six months, exchanging glances charged with unspoken possibility. Now he must have her. He writes a play for her brilliance. It makes her a star. On the very threshold of their romance, her past arrives to shatter everything. Oppenheim, writing at the height of his powers, constructs a deliciously propulsive tale of artistic transformation and romantic suspense. The prose fizzes with period charm, the dialogue crackles, and Berenice herself emerges as a magnificently modern woman trapped in an Edwardian world that demands she choose between her history and her future. For readers who savor the guilty pleasure of golden-age romantic fiction, when novels knew how to build a cliffhanger and actresses could still be mysterious.