1920: a cohort of Oxford men gather at the Phoenix Club for one last dinner before they scatter into the thorny gardens of adulthood. Among them is Lady Barbara Neave, daughter of a viceroy, whose beauty is matched only by her appetite for chaos. She is Lilith reborn, not in the biblical sense of monster, but in the Rossettian sense of pure, untameable allure. The young men have ambitions Eric Lane wants journalism, Jack Waring drifts toward the law but Lady Barbara has ambitions too, though they're harder to name. She wants excitement, sensation, the electric thrill of watching well-ordered lives tremble. Stephen McKenna writes with the scalpel precision of a man who understands that society is a performance and everyone's stage-managing. The novel crackles with early 20th-century social comedy, but beneath the wit lies genuine unease: these characters stand at the edge of a new era, uncertain whether they'll rise or fall. Lady Barbara Neave is the engine of that uncertainty, a figure who makes promises with her eyes that her mouth never confirms. For readers who savor sharp social observation wrapped in elegant prose, this is a portrait of temptation you won't forget.
