Ballet, opera, art and music are woven throughout Barbara Trapido's latest novel, but she says: “I wasn't thinking, ‘I will write a very cultured book, with references to ballet and opera’. It just happened that these things sparked off images for me.”

Sex and Stravinsky has a carefully patterned plot of disappearances, splittings-up and pairings, mirroring the story of the Russian composer’s ballet Pulcinella.

It is her first novel for seven years, and, like her other work, is infused with her knowledge of art, literature and music, dripping with literary allusions, stylised coincidences and entanglements.

She said: “I started this book years ago, writing it in vignettes, but I couldn’t work out how the scenes were connected and I realised it was going to take a long time.”

She abandoned it to concentrate on memories of her South African childhood and adolescence that eventually became her sixth novel, Frankie & Stankie, published in 2003. “The Sex and Stravinsky story was not clear to me, so I thought I would put it by. Meanwhile, I had an idea for a more chronological story. It was something to do with turning 60 and one’s parents dying and the end of Apartheid. When I had done that, I thought I could go back to the earlier story.”

Having settled in Oxford in 1971, she had tried to forget her traumatic departure from South Africa in 1968, just after the regime had shut down all legal protest. Her new book combines scenes from her South African past with her present life in Oxford.

The hero, Josh, the adopted son of a liberal Jewish family in South Africa, shared his childhood with the housemaid’s child Jack, who has disappeared without trace. Josh comes to study the history of mime in Oxford, where he meets his Australian wife Caroline. They are forced to live in a disused bus off the Abingdon Road because Caroline has to bankroll her ungrateful mother, living nearby in a suburban bungalow. Josh, invited to a mime conference in South Africa, reconnects with his teenage sweetheart Hattie, who had been forced by her parents to give up her ambition to be a ballerina. Meanwhile, Hattie’s difficult daughter, Cat, is up against a deadline for her project on masks.

The author leaves countless strings dangling in the air, keeping the reader hooked until the denouement. She said: “It’s rather like Commedia dell’Arte. Masks have always been something to do with deception; about people not being who they seem to be, or who they think they are. I have always loved stories about dressing up and running away and people pretending to be someone else.”

She added: “Not only is it addressing the Pulcinella story, it is also very like a dance. The characters take 20 years to go back to where they were, and then they get second chances, which means some are winners and some are losers.”

The book’s long gestation period was extended still further when her historian husband Stan, an Oxford University lecturer, suffered a stroke and died two years ago at 74. “Writing, no matter how sad it is, takes a lot of positive energy. I couldn’t combine writing it with looking after Stan, so I just stuffed the novel in a box again.

“When he died, I spent a year or so floating about, feeling ungrounded. I think I was a bit frightened to pull it out because you fear that your story is set in concrete. But eventually, I saw how I could get it to dance.”

Even at the best of times, Trapido, 68, does not churn out books rapidly. Surprisingly for the creator of such intricate plots, she starts writing with no idea where the story is going, inspired by an image, a work of art, a memory of a place. She then drafts and redrafts, “re-writing everything about 100 times”. The result is well worth waiting for.

She was 41 when her first published novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack, won a Whitbread prize in 1982. Noah’s Ark followed, then a six-year gap before a series of three interlinked comedies. Temples of Delight drew on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Juggling echoed Shakespearian comedy. She was going to stop there, but was advised by the late Oxford crime writer Michael Dibdin to write a third book. The result was The Travelling Hornplayer, mirroring Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin.

Can we expect any Sex and Stravinsky characters to resurface in her next book?

“Maybe I’ll bring some of them back. I’m always a bit slow at picking up my pencil and starting again.”

l Sex and Stravinsky is published by Bloomsbury at £18.99. Barbara Trapido is at the Woodstock Bookshop on Tuesday.