A Quiet Adjustment Benjamin Markovits Faber & Faber, 328pp, £12.99

Imposture, the first instalment of Benjamin Markovits's fictional Byron trilogy, circled around the poet via his physician, John Polidori. That novel dealt with fakery - Polidori impersonating Byron for personal gain - and the artifice of celebrity. Though Byron was at its core, we never really got to see him. In A Quiet Adjustment, Byron remains similarly opaque as Markovits brings to life an episode at the heart of the poet's mythology: his disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke and incestuous relationship with Augusta Leigh, his half-sister. Divided into three discrete sections - "Courtship", "Marriage" and "Separation" - A Quiet Adjustment is a beautifully crafted tale of tainted love, Austenesque in style, Byronic in its melodrama.

Biographers have frequently portrayed Annabella as prim and stone-hearted, unworthy of a man of such passion. "He could hardly make love to a statue," Byron intimates to her at one point. But the story is told from Annabella's point of view, and presents a far more sympathetic (and sensible) figure than she is often given credit for. The novel ends with the infamous destruction of Byron's memoirs following his death. "His side of the story had gone up in smoke," we are told. "What was left was hers."

In the opening chapters, a reclusive and introspective Annabella meets Byron at a ball. "Childe Harold" has just been published to great acclaim and though Annabella never "blindly followed the fashions", she finds herself "almost feverish with unspoken feeling". At a supper party, they bond over their shared misanthropy. "Do you think there is one person here who dares to look into himself?" whispers Byron, to her delight. Annabella, like Byron, is obscured by her reputation ("her opinions were more frequently honoured than asked for"). She has had her share of suitors and is now being pursued by a clergyman. Byron is dismissive. "Now," he says, "there is a good man, a handsome man, an honourable man, a most inoffensive man, a well-informed man, and a dull man, and this last epithet undoes the rest."

To Annabella, aged 19, marriage is unappetising: "What a terrible thing it seemed, to surrender your life to a man!" Yet Byron, she feels, can be saved by a good woman, much like Childe Harold. Markovits soon sets alarm bells ringing, however, when he has Annabella admire a bust of her future spouse: "He would do very well as a husband in marble."

In the second, and most compelling, section, the two have come to "a sort of understanding". Annabella has already rejected Byron once, and they are now bound by a mutual "unhappiness". Annabella finally cedes in the course of an amorous correspondence; they are engaged, though Byron already senses doom: "You might have saved me once." Then she overhears him casually talking about marriage to his friend Hobhouse, and suddenly perceives herself through "the coldness of a loveless eye".

Markovits swiftly charts the disintegration of their relationship. His Byron is capricious, cruel, self-pitying, childish, at one moment given to intoxicating mirth, at another to throwing bottles at the ceiling in rage. Page after page delineates his moodiness: "When indignation takes possession of his mind, and it is easily excited, his disposition becomes malevolent." On honeymoon, he mooches around, scowling and quaffing endless bottles of Tokay. "Do you mean to sleep in the same bed with me?" he asks his recently deflowered wife. "I hate sleeping with any woman - but you may do as you please." She does her best to enjoy some "almost happy afternoons", but quickly becomes accustomed to "the constant quiet level of unhappiness".

Byron's sister offers some comfort and the two become friends, in defence against the monstrous poet. Augusta gives Annabella some useful advice: "Never mind what he says and see that he eats enough." Yet she remains in thrall to her brother, unresistant to his physical advances, silent at his provocative references to their "quiet little escapes". Annabella watches on, at first convinced that it is only her husband's "strong confessional instinct" at play, suggesting things "which have no reality but in the fervency of his imagination". Then, slowly, a hazy and horrific picture of the incestuous relationship emerges.

This secret lies at the centre of the "Separation" segment. Annabella enjoys the power that the knowledge of Byron's transgression gives her, but still wishes to save Augusta, reasoning that "I will not be a party to her ruin". A coterie of friends offers advice and interventions.

If the narrative here becomes somewhat clotted with competing voices, this is a rare curb to our enjoyment. A Quiet Adjustment is a worthy addition to the literature of the Byron legend, and an excellent novel in its own right. Markovits has produced an absorbing portrait of the celebrity couple and an unworkable marriage to an exhilarating but unmanageable man.

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