Stephen Millhauser's The King In the Tree is, quite simply, a tour-de-force. These are three novellas and each one is blindingly brilliant. Millhauser writes like an angel: the language is taut, superbly controlled. There is nothing of the bludgeon in this writing - Millhauser is a surgeon at the peak of his profession and he wields the scalpel of his writing with astounding virtuosity and skill as he dissects that most basic - and, in his conceptualisation, the most base - of all human emotions: love.

Millhauser's forte is the gradual, but relentless, drawing of the reader into a web from which he cannot escape. The first novella, "Revenge", perhaps not to everyone's taste, skillfully avoids being banal and contrived which, given its thematic structure and content, was always a significant risk. It is conceived as a monologue as a widowed housewife shows a potential buyer around her house. The prospective buyer is her late husband's mistress. It is masterfully crafted and Millhauser somehow pulls off what might, in lesser hands, been merely improbable. Here, just as we get slowly into the house, through its various rooms (finally the attic and the cellar), we get into the widow's head and mind and heart. Each room is a metaphor for an incident or a chapter in her life, another dimension or facet of her existence and being. The house, as a whole, is her and she is the house.

The writing here is taut, spare, even sparse. We do not know if we are actually in the house or in the mind of the widow and perhaps that is just as well ("the cheap motel of my mind"). The story has the dark foreboding of Henry James, set in an utterly contemporary context. We do not, at the end, know for sure how much of truth there is in the widow's reconstruction and deconstruction of her own life and its ruin. Was she responsible for her husband's death, the ultimate act of revenge? You begin to want to believe this but cannot and that is where Millhauser leaves us: "You let me know. You just let me know."

From this point on, the book shifts into a higher gear. The second novella, "An Adventure of Don Juan" is rich and luscious, like succulent fruit that, when you bite into it, is tart in the mouth with its sadness and melancholy, yet drips sweetly down your chin with its honeyed tongue. After conquering Venice in a delightfully musketeerish and cavalier manner, Don Juan finds himself bored and accompanies an Englishman to his country estate. The host, Augustus Hood, is that quintessential man of England - builder, gardener, scientist, philosopher and, as it turns out, philanderer and adulterer. In a piquant variant, the legendary lover finds himself at the receiving end as he begins to fall in love with a woman he thinks he cannot stand; and only to find that the woman who loves him is herself betrayed. Deception springs from every page, slight, nuanced, like the subtlest sidelong glance that pierces and is gone.