The title of Amanda Craig’s enjoyable and provocative ninth novel might conjure the dancing trio in Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ (which we visit in the book, set in Tuscany); but the three graces here are Ruth, Diana and Marta, elderly expat friends who meet for weekly gossips over coffee, ‘united by age, exile, the love of dogs and their disinclination to discuss their infirmities’. The women may be less beautiful than Botticelli’s, but they are certainly more formidable. By the end of the first chapter they’ve already smashed a car window to rescue an overheating dog.

Their idyll is thrown into turmoil when Ruth finds herself hosting her grandson’s ill-matched wedding, Diana’s dementia-suffering husband takes a turn for the worse, and Marta must summon all her strength for a final piano recital. It’s a potent scenario for the author’s grappling with current issues – which here include traffickers and illegal migrants, the war in Ukraine and the legacy of British colonialism.

Craig enjoys revisiting characters from her previous books, so it’s no surprise that these women have appeared before, as have other members of the cast. In shifting her focus from her central trio to the interlinked crowd, she makes the point that the elderly aren’t separate from the rest of us, and that we are all intrinsic to each other’s lives. The influence of E.M. Forster, and his imperative ‘Only connect’, is frequently felt, as is that of Trollope, Austen, Shakespeare and other literary greats. 

The characters are easily imaginable people (Craig has said in an interview that ‘they’re with me all the time’), but they also provide vehicles to explore thorny problems. Through Tania, a misunderstood, traumatised, shy and beautiful young woman, we delve into social media and autism; in Xan, a thoughtful, lonely young man, struggling to work out what he’s doing with his life, we explore racism and Generation Rent. As Craig follows these characters, flitting between their perspectives, we can’t help but empathise with their different viewpoints and engage with the debates. Although the novel initially seems to hark back to classic portraits of the British rediscovering themselves in Italy, such as Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April or Forster’s A Room with a View, it is riddled with today’s pressing concerns.

Similarly, the endearing friendship of the old ladies – ‘Some years, the same box of Floris soaps shuttled between the three of them for months, on the tacit understanding that it was never opened’ – is shot through with the realities of ageing: pain, poverty and acute loneliness. The plot in part adopts the comforting structure of Shakespearean comedy (the surfacing of long-lost relations; mismatched couples finding their ideal partners), but there’s also a violent strand: a bomb, a shooting, a car crash, a body in a mill pond. The novel is both easy and challenging, romantic and realistic. Its success lies in the ever-present tension between light and dark. These three graces turn out to be more Caravaggio than Botticelli.