In Claire Messud's extraordinary second novel, The Last Life, the privileged daughter of a French-Algerian father and an American mother comes of age in the false security of her grandfather's hotel on France's southern coast. One day, in a startling burst of violence, her isolation—from the community, from her family, and ultimately from herself—is permanently sealed, and home becomes an imaginary idyll she can only glimpse from the outside. Without the sure footing of personal identity, she's doomed to float adrift in a lonely, delusional world of her own making. A similar predicament strikes the adult characters in The Hunters, a pair of crisp, evocative novellas that confirm the remarkable versatility of Messud's narrative voice while keeping pace with her thematic obsessions. The first and more impressive of the two, "A Simple Tale," tells the sprawling story of Maria Poniatowski, an elderly Ukrainian housekeeper who survived a harrowing stay at a German labor camp and later settled in Toronto with her husband, Lev, whose own traumas are too gruesome to dredge up. The sole product of their quiet, incommunicative union is Radek, or "Rod," a strapping all-Canadian boy whose decision to wed a half-German woman disappoints Maria so much that her hatred consumes all rationality. She even goes so far as to blame Lev's death on his grief over that marriage, despite every indication that he actually liked Radek's bride. Punctuating the present with vivid flashbacks, Messud reveals the origin of Maria's loathing and shows how it informs a toxic worldview that doesn't always jibe with reality. But Maria's made-up scenarios are relatively minor compared to those of the eponymous story's hero, a transplanted American writer in London who invents diabolical fictions about the tenants downstairs. On leave from a professorship in the states, the nameless, genderless narrator eyes the apartment dwellers like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, leaping to conclusions based on even sketchier information. For example, when an ingratiating neighbor, a young caretaker for the elderly infirm, confesses that her patients rarely live very long, the narrator surmises that she's killing them off, and that her mother may be the next victim. Written in punchy, staccato prose, "The Hunters" contrasts sharply with the languid, eloquent language of "A Simple Tale," but Messud draws both forms into a consistent narrative vision. Though these stories work well enough on their own terms, together they circle around the same feelings of solitude and crippling self-delusion that haunted The Last Life. Capable of inhabiting an astonishing range of characters, settings, periods, tones, and genres, Messud's inestimable stylistic gifts are as apparent as her crystalline understanding of the human imagination.