Natural elements

In his much celebrated debut novel, The Drowning People, Richard Mason ("An Oxonian literary sensation"—The New York Times Book Review) wrote with wisdom and mastery well beyond his twenty-one years—about love, betrayal, and revenge, and about the particular ritualized world of the English upper class. Now in his dazzling new novel Mason writes about mothers and daughters; aging and death; memory and longing; history and narrative; and about the high-stakes, full-tilt embrace of life. The setting is London. The time is the present. Mother and daughter are choosing an assisted-living facility…