Writers have a deep fascination with late Victorian England, and why not? The era comes ready with the very elements that make a wonderful house for a novel: a deep class division upset by a burgeoning bourgeoisie; the industrial revolution and the social and economic shifts it brought; the birth of suffragism; new inventions, the car and the telephone among them, that would further change daily life; dangerous new political ideas; and a growing, nagging sense that England was no longer the center of the universe.

Tracy Chevalier mines many of these themes in her brilliant new novel, "Falling Angels." She begins with a shocking scene that presages the themes she'll weave throughout the story: Kitty Coleman wakes in a strange bed with a man who is not her husband. It is New Year's Day, 1901. When the stranger leaves and her husband Richard enters the room he is coming from another bed she smells another woman's perfume on him. "Yet I could say nothing. As I myself have so often said, I am open-minded I pride myself on it. Those words bite now."

The next scene takes place in a large cemetery in London that is filled with people mourning the death of Queen Victoria. Two families visit their side-by-side grave sites. The Colemans, decidedly of the new Edwardian era, have decorated theirs with a large urn. The Waterhouses, of a slightly lower class and solidly Victorian tastes, have chosen a huge, sentimental angel. Both markers are ostentatious, and each family hates the other's choice. As the two couples size each other up, their 5-year-old daughters, Maude Coleman and Livinia Waterhouse, become best friends. They also befriend Simon Field, a wise and observant little boy who helps his father dig graves. The novel, which spans an eventful 10 years, is told by each of the characters in short, alternating sections. The cemetery becomes the focal point of the novel and of the children's lives. The girls return to it again and again, visiting the 31 angels that inhabit the necropolis, playing with Simon but never considering the inevitable way that the plots will ultimately be used by their families.

Maude, an only child, is plain and intelligent. She spends much of her time trying to connect with her mother, Kitty, a tragic figure whose restlessness makes her chafe under the mores of her time. As Kitty flits from one attempt to define herself to another, she wreaks havoc on herself and on those around her.

Lavinia's mother Gertrude, by contrast, clings to convention like a life raft. Her tenuous hold on the upper middle class doesn't allow her to consider so small a change as a geometrically patterned tea set, and she is raising her beautiful, self-centered daughter Livy and less-attractive younger daughter Ivy May in her image. Kitty's headlong rush to change her life, combined with Gertrude's fearful determination to keep things just as they are, create a tragedy that affects both families. As Chevalier so clearly shows, major change doesn't come without consequences, but a stubborn clinging to the familiar can also be fatal.

In many ways this is an old-fashioned novel. Chevalier pulls out tried-and-true literary devices symbolism, foreshadowing, irony, surprising plot twists to create a rich story that is true to the era without being a pastiche.

Her clever construction allows her to present her story from many points of view, and she ably captures the different voices of the characters who speak to us.