(Think of Armistead Maupin or Laurie Colwin in a moodier register.) She’s playful with characterization and voice Eleanor’s sections are distinctively written in the first-person, with a young writer’s pitch-perfect brashness and anxiety. The novel’s somber stretches, wide cast of characters, and cross sections of New York social spheres strongly evoke Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, but Mellors also cultivates a sprightlier style that keeps the novel’s familiar tropes from feeling clichéd or reducing her characters to types.

Affairs are considered and/or consummated. Eleanor, a young copywriter at Frank’s firm, is a perceived threat. His fashion-student sister, Zoe, grows reckless, needy, and similarly addictive. Frank’s drinking regresses into alcoholism. Quentin, Cleo’s closest friend, is consumed by a jealousy he sublimates into drugs and sex. Figuring out whether that decision has to do with true love, keeping Cleo in the country, or satisfying other suppressed needs is just one of the storm clouds that soon blow in.

Easy banter leads to flirtation, and flirtation speeds to romance within six months, they’re married. On New Year’s Eve 2006, Cleo, a 24-year-old budding British artist, shares an elevator with Frank, a 40-something ad exec. Mellors’ remarkably assured and sensitive debut opens with a meet-cute that’s as charming and frothy as it is misleading. A May-December romance rapidly hits turbulence in early-aughts Manhattan.

Cleopatra and frankenstein book