In this graceful, erotically lush novella, a young girl leaves her strict Vienna home to serve as a nanny in the household of modernist poet H.D. and her lover, Winifred Ellerman. Alice leaves a tightly-bound Jewish home for the keen literary lives of "Kat" and "Gryphon" in Vevey, Switzerland. Her sexuality blossoms alongside theirs in a 1930s Europe under existential threat of approaching war and holocaust.

This taut, handsome tale brings the gone world so gleamingly to life you could imagine it was all happening just yesterday or earlier today or even tomorrow. Not only does...