“It begins with a child . . .” So opens Jane Mendelsohn’s powerful new novel. Or really with two children, two girls. One, from the Caucasus, sold into the sex trade; the other, the adopted daughter—his beloved sister’s orphaned child—of Steve, patriarch of the Zane family. In cinematic, dazzlingly described scenes—from lavish weddings to the transglobal underworld; from London, Rome and New York to Laos and Istanbul—we meet all the Zanes, their staff, and their friends. In precise yet lush prose, Mendelsohn captures the emotional worlds of these characters with visceral immediacy, and transforms their private stories into a larger drama about the forces of globalization, human trafficking, and sexual violence, finding inextricable connections between the personal and the political.