TRESPASS

Valerie Martin (Weidenfeld, £16.99)

In 2003 Valerie Martin won the Orange Prize for Property, a riveting novel about slavery. In her latest book, she again plays out individual lives against bigger concerns, this time of civil war and aggression. The story concerns two families, one in the US, the other from Yugoslavia.

Chloe and Brendan Dale, a comfortable academic couple, live in an idyllic rural retreat in the Catskills. She is an artist currently absorbed in illustrating Wuthering Heights, he a peaceable historian working on the 13th-century Emperor Frederick II, when their beloved son Toby shatters the even tenor of their lives by bringing home Salome Drago, a refugee from Croatia. In Romeo and Juliet mode, the couple are in love but come from very different cultures and aspirations.

Chloe is sure Salome has her eye on Tony's money and becoming a nationalised American. From their first meeting, Chloe and the beautiful, tough and unforgiving young woman are on a collision course.

With Bush invading Iraq, Salome becomes increasingly concerned. Why, she wonders, did her father escape to safety, taking Salome and his one son and abandoning his wife Jelena to the cruelty of the Serbs during the bloody conflict in Yugoslavia, where his other son was cruelly murdered? Could Jelena still be alive?

When Salome finds she is pregnant, she tries to find her mother who, it turns out, had an adulterous affair with a Serb. Toby finds himself drawn into the secret history of Salome's family, follows her to Croatia and thence to Trieste in the hunt for Jelena, whose harsh and harrowing story, written in brief first-person italicised sections, is set against Tony's generous, gentle love for Salome.

Martin interweaves the linked notions of trespass in the novel, especially Chloe's obsession with Heathcliff, the foundling gypsy child, who could be of Eastern European origins.

There is also a poacher who hangs around Chloe's house, reminding her of Salome, another interloper. Everything conspires to unsettle her, upsetting home and family, until she "feels her territory has been invaded and she is under attack" and these "outsiders are now insiders, staking their claims".

Trespass is a novel that draws you in with gathering power. What could have been simply a family drama widens into political conflict that finally ends in East-West reconciliation and forgiveness.