I read The Shades, the debut novel of Evgenia Citkowitz, in one sitting while I was supposed to be working on a very different project—and, days later, it’s still distracting me. The Shades packs the fictional Francis family’s total deterioration into a tense, slim volume. Engrossing as theirstory is, there are shades in it of Citkowitz’s own life always reminding the reader of her background: Her famous and famously difficult mother, the Irish heiress and comic novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood; her father, composer Israel Citkowitz; and her stepfather, the poet Robert Lowell.

Although the Francises are Londoners, much of The Shades takes place in their grand old Kentish country house. A year after their daughter Rachel’s death in a car accident, London gallerist Catherine and her luxury real estate broker husband Michael face their fundamental flaws from either side of a dividing wall built deep into their marriage. The title gains significance when we see how Michael and Catherine spent their first successful date—at Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, where she slipped into a sublime abstract state of appreciation and declared the centuries-old opera the most modern of all. “It isn’t about whether he was successful in bringing her back,” she insists to Michael, who thinks her meditation on modernity had to do with how Monteverdi altered the myth of Orpheus. “It’s that he went to get her at all.”