‘Has any work of art in any medium ever had a better title than Women Beware Women?’ wondered the narrator of John Lanchester’s first novel, The Debt to Pleasure (1996). It would certainly fit his new book, a gleamingly accomplished black comedy that, like Middleton’s Jacobean play, seethes with female animosity and vengeance. But his chosen title, shared with a Taylor Swift song about deception (‘I don’t like your little games/don’t like your tilted stage’), proves even more apt. Skewed scenarios and retaliatory stratagems are craftily deployed in a novel that’s a kaleidoscope of tilting perspectives.

The opening pages take us into a milieu of well-heeled and self-satisfied metropolitan socialising. Kate, the first of the book’s two narrators, once an academic art historian, now comfortably retired, recalls being at a dinner party with her husband, Jack, a prosperous architect, at the showpiece home of similarly middle-aged and moneyed friends. One moment stood out. Glimpsing a flicker of contempt on the face of a younger guest, she sensed ‘an intergenerational dislike’, 

a mid-thirties person looking at people a quarter of a century older than her and seeing a complacent affluence, an unearned self-confidence and assuredness, born of … having cruised through life sitting on the great sofa of baby boomer entitlement and economic good fortune. 

It’s the first tremor of the