The Rare and the Beautiful, by Cressida Connolly

Musky perfume, fur coat and no knickers

Pay attention, please: this biographical work is a complicated modern comedy, tracing the lives of the nine Garman siblings born to a Black Country doctor either side of 1900. Mary, the eldest, married the poet Roy Campbell, had two daughters and a passionate fling with Vita Sackville-West, prompting Virginia Woolf to conceive Orlando. She moved to France and Spain, and ended in the ascetic embrace of Catholicism.

Kathleen, third eldest, ran away to London, fell in with the Café Royal crowd and into bed with sculptor Jacob Epstein. She was shot in the shoulder by his wife but remained regular mistress and mother of three, acceding to marriage after 30 years as Lady Epstein: benefactor of Walsall Art Gallery.

Douglas, fourth child and first son, was an aspiring poet and Marxist, editor at the Communist publishers Lawrence & Wishart, and sexual partner of the heiress Peggy Guggenheim. Lorna, seventh sister and last child, precociously seductive and married at 16 to her brother's friend Ernest Wishart, was the lover of Llewelyn Powys, Laurie Lee and the young Lucian Freud, who later married Lorna's niece Kitty, Kathleen's daughter. In turn, Laurie Lee married another niece, Kathy, daughter of Helen Garman.

Got all that? A genealogical tree is not supplied. The remaining sisters sound equally appealing. Sylvia, a mannish figure, was reputed to have seduced her Dorset neighbour TE Lawrence. Ruth, who "couldn't go into a pub without getting pregnant", had five children, one possibly by the entertainer Leslie Hutchinson. Rosalind, as a renowned rose-grower, was outclassed.

Cameo roles are given to Laurens van der Post and the creator of the Marmalade Cat, while one Shandyan footnote tells how Douglas Garman's first wife's second husband became camera director for Crossroads and had a bit part in Doctor Who.

All the Garmans were blessed with dramatic looks and independent spirits. Not reared to earn a living or do housework, the women opted for beauty, art and freedom. They liked ocelot coats, musky perfumes, grand gestures. With determined hedonism, they rejected sentiment, the only approved emotions being sexual passion and jealous rage.

What of the children? I counted the Garman cousinage as at least 16. Several suffered neglect, brought up without table manners or clean knickers, billeted with foster-carers, ignored by one parent or both, expected to fend for themselves and do well into the bargain.

Cressida Connolly, whose parents knew some of the cousins, keeps a straight face. Troubled by the children's fate, she devotes a postcript to the tragic deaths of Kathleen's daughter and son, one by suicide, the other while being sedated en route to mental hospital. It is a sobering coda to an often hilarious tale.