Two years ago, an 80-year-old British writer named Jane Campbell published her debut fiction collection, “Cat Brushing,” to acclaim and a bit of astonishment. The 13 stories centered female protagonists of the author’s age, revealing them to be sexier, snappier and far less docile or limited by convention than stereotype would suggest. Also surprising were eerie plot twists, dystopian flourishes and dark or sudden endings.

Two years later she has published her first novel, “Interpretations of Love.” The idea for the book has been with her a long time, she explains in an afterword, but were it not for a two-book deal her agent brokered, she might not have written it.

BOOK REVIEW

Grove

“Interpretations of Love,” by Jane Campbell. Grove. 244 pgs. $28

It is the story of a long-held secret whose revelation unfolds in six vignettes narrated from the perspective of three characters: Professor Malcolm Miller, a retired Oxford don in his 80s; Dr. Joseph Bradshaw, a retired psychotherapist, also in his 80s; and Malcolm’s niece, a divorced academic philosopher named Dr. Agnes Stacey, in her mid-50s.

As narrators, they all sound pretty much the same: thoughtful, elegant, self-analytical, fluently offering vivid description and interesting thoughts. These range from “It is never a good idea to make decisive gestures when drunk and on a whim” to “I believe Spinoza said something to the effect that, if a stone that had been projected through the air had consciousness, it would believe it was moving of its own volition.”

We begin with Malcolm, who lives rather miserably in a care home, and who is preparing to attend the wedding of his grandniece Elfie – Agnes’s daughter – the next day. This, he has decided, will be the occasion on which he finally delivers a letter he has been hanging on to for a half-century.

One day in 1946, Malcolm’s sister Sophy handed him the letter, addressed to “Dr. Joseph Bradshaw, Private and Personal.” A few days later, Sophy and her husband, who were to spend a few days vacationing without then-4-year-old Agnes, were in a fatal car accident. The last words out of Sophy’s mouth before she died were to confirm that Malcolm had indeed delivered the letter.

Not only did Malcolm not deliver the letter either before or after his sister’s death, he more or less forgot about it, or tried his best to, until he paid a visit years later to the grown-up Agnes and her then-husband Richard, who had been having problems.

Things were going a little better, Agnes confided: She was seeing a wonderful therapist, Dr. Joe Bradshaw.

Oy vey, says the reader. “What were the chances of that?” thinks Malcolm, though he utters not a word to Agnes.

In the second section of the novel, also set the day before the wedding, we hear from Joe, telling us how madly taken with his patient Agnes he was during her therapy … so much so that friends sharply cautioned him to avoid impropriety. Campbell also has him give us the full scoop on a messy affair we’ve heard about, another situation where love and loyalty and betrayal and the ways people justify their behavior to themselves are prominent. Interpretations of love abound.

The third section is Agnes’s and it’s the day of the wedding. Finally, we get to know the woman at the center of it all – a younger version of the type of woman we meet in “Cat Brushing” – and things come to a head. It doesn’t go smoothly. Further sections take place further into the future, returning to the perspectives of Malcolm and Joe and then Agnes. The ending is … quite unexpected.

But I can assure you will be racing to get there. This suspenseful, morally complex plot reminded me a bit of Ian McEwan’s “Atonement.” Let’s hope Jane Campbell’s agent is cooking up more ways to get this unusual and interesting writer back to her desk.

Marion Winik, host of the NPR podcast “The Weekly Reader,” is the author of numerous books, including “First Comes Love” and “The Big Book of the Dead.”