Orange Prize-winning author Valerie Martin has a compelling new novel called Trespass. It is a provocative meditation on freedom and safety, foreignness and boundaries, an obvious comment on our current cultural climate, and a story that rejects time.

I read Martin's excellent collection of short stories The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories last year. As the title might suggest, the stories surround the creative process and the dynamics of power and personality and intimacy as channeled through the artist’s eyes.

Trespass picks up with Chloe Dale, also an artist - an illustrator, whose contented existence is disrupted by her son’s new romance. Set against the backdrop of the impending US invasion of Iraq, the story thrusts Chloe and her husband out of their comfortable, suburban, vaguely liberal world and their comfortable, suburban expectations for their son Toby when he brings home a difficult, intelligent, unmannered, and exotic new girlfriend. Salome is a Croatian refugee who is to Toby an intoxicating mix of radical ideology and old world tradition and to Chloe, immediately suspect. Her distrust starts out as the protective mother sort, but the intensity is unrelenting and her fixation only increases.

Chloe registers Salome as an intrusion, and as the plot progresses and the entanglements increase, Chloe becomes more and more alienated from the life she has created with her family and retreats further into her artistic process. Martin’s commanding narrative voice and her characters ambiguity allows her to frame this novel with moral and political overtones without making it a lesson.