Still Here Linda Grant Little, Brown, 375pp, £16.99 ISBN 0316859931

This ambitious account of love, lust and cosmetics sweeps from Chicago to Dresden, rural Canada to Tel Aviv, but its heart never leaves the author's home town of Liverpool, a proud, salty city that clings resolutely to its Beatles heritage even as it embraces a future of drugs and crime. People have been leaving the "western gateway to the empire" ever since they began arriving there, but there are those, too, who have never moved on. The Rebicks are one such family, Jewish immigrants who bought their passage out of eastern Europe to New York, only to find themselves moored on the Mersey.

Alix and her brother, Sam, are the second generation not to have reached the "America!" for which their forefathers once set sail; they stayed on to become leading lights in the local community. But although the Rebicks seem destined to remain rooted in Europe, America is about to come to them in the form of Joseph Shields, a tough architect from Chicago who is intent on rejuvenating Liverpool. Alix and Sam lead lives gilded by the profits of their mother Lotte's special cleansing cream, a few jars of which she smuggled with her out of Nazi Germany. As she slips slowly away at the start of the novel, she makes one final demand of her children: that they return to Dresden to wrest back the family factory. This quest adds momentum to what is, in truth, an overly discursive plot.

The central preoccupation of the book, however, is really middle-aged eroticism. Amid the riffs on everything from good and evil to the perfect application of mascara, there emerges a love story of sorts. Alix Rebick, a criminologist by trade, is a formidable woman and was once, briefly, the "hot academic babe" of the media circuit, before falling foul of political correctness and getting kicked off campus. Raised by her father to be fearlessly outspoken, schooled in femininity by her mother, Alix is mouthy and red-blooded, with crimson nails and vermilion lips to match.

Despite many lovers, she remains single at the age of 49, spiky and sensual in about equal measure. But, on meeting the married Joseph Shields, she recognises more than a kindred spirit: she sees a sexual adventurer like herself. Alix is "a taker of space" and, although Joseph's side of the story is offered in alternate chapters, her voice dominates this binary narrative.

This is not a humourless novel, which is just as well, because Alix's favourite sexual fantasy involves a steamy scene with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. On learning that Joseph dodged the draft only to end up serving in the Israeli army during the Yom Kippur war, she knows she has met her match. "A soldier! A Jewish soldier! The toughest of the tough guys," she exclaims, and says: "Be gone with you, Issie, a new phantasm will come to me tonight."

Shields is not the only American male here: with gently jocularity, Grant weaves into the text the names of the USA's old men of letters. Saul Bellow, for instance, represents a man of the ideal age for a woman of Alix's years to be dating, while "a woman who had been a babe at 20", we are told, "can look like Norman Mailer at 60". Alix is proud to be "a very vaginal woman". In her appetites, she could easily pass for a sister to any one of Philip Roth's lustful, tyrannical anti-heroes. Asking herself what remains of the woman she once was, the answer comes back to her: "Lust." Alix is simply unable to envisage life sans sex. "I was afraid of who I was without it," she confides, "I might as well be dead." But if Roth's heroes need only pop a pill these days to ensure peak performance forever and anon, medical science is less well equipped to solve the woes of a middle-aged woman trapped in a deteriorating body. Men, Alix discovers, simply look straight through her.

Still Here is a larger, more ambitious novel than Linda Grant's Orange Prize-winning When I Lived in Modern Times; but, although the ending lends a note of defiance to the title, her meditative, ideas-heavy prose too often embodies stasis.

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