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Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch that it is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. In the shallow and infantilising age through which we are living, Colin Thubron dares to assume that his readers are adults. Passage is a very beautiful, very moving, authentic work of art. Hardly more than a novella, it sits lightly in the hand, but its emotional and aesthetic weight overtips the balance.

Thubron began his career as a travel writer and a large part of the action of Passage is set in a vividly but economically evoked Egypt. This is not the teeming Egypt of Cairo or Alexandria, but of the countryside, the villages, and the great immemorial tombs and ancient monuments. The best travel writers know that “abroad” is most convincingly evoked not by awed exclamations at the world’s wonders, but by an attitude of relaxed familiarity. Thubron is obviously an old Egypt hand, or at least has the skill to convince us that he is.

The story he tells is both simple and subtle. The main character is Kathleen, an Anglicised Australian actor whose father had emigrated from Slovenia. She is in her 40s, beautiful and gravely ill, and the brief first chapter is a toe-curlingly stark description of an operation on her brain to investigate a tumour which, as we will learn, is incurable.

As it happens, Kathleen’s husband, Robert, is himself a brain specialist, and has elected, unwisely, to be present at the operation, “standing as far away as space allows … He finds himself staring speechless into his wife’s brain. It is a turmoil of ink and crimson coils, faintly pulsing under the surgeon’s instrument.” Kathleen is awake, and answering questions that will help the doctor to identify cancerous tissue.

Robert and Kathleen’s marriage has gone stale; also, it has a historical blemish, since it was Robert’s younger brother, Alan, who first met Kathleen and fell in love with her when they were both in their teens. The one who loved the most was Alan; Kathleen, having returned home to Melbourne, wrote to him more and more infrequently, then not at all. “It was not until six years later that she reappeared, on Robert’s arm.”

Kathleen is a wonderful creation: strong-willed, outspoken, and above all clear-eyed, about herself and others. She knows how ill she is, but is determined not to give in to self-pity and to live her life as fully as she can to the end, even if the end should prove bitter. Although the surgeon advises against it, she insists, only weeks after the operation, on setting off, with Robert and Alan – yes, Alan does seem a glutton for heartache – on the Egyptian holiday that had been planned before she became ill.

One of the most admirable aspects of the book is Thubron’s restraint in exploiting the symbolic possibilities that this journey holds out to him. Egypt, after all, or the parts of it that the travellers visit, is itself a kind of afterworld. “The temple city that was gathering around them, with its unreadable carvings and maimed statues, was a ruined monument to death and memory.”

Death and memory: these are the poles between which Kathleen’s dwindling existence is strung. What for the other tourists are more or less interesting sites, and sights, are for her the points of exit that she must soon step through: “When her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw in front of her a gold-lit corridor that appeared to reach into infinity. In its walls, painted gods marched or floated through an ocean of hieroglyphs. Above her spread a constellation of stars.”

When she encounters a local guide, the soft-spoken and quietly considerate Ashraf, it seems she is being offered another and surely final chance at love. However, she knows it is an impossibility: “She imagined his hands encountering with horror the sutures under her hair.” What she does not know is that Ashraf, a political activist, is already a marked man, as she is a marked woman, in a different way, and for different reasons.

Passage is an exquisitely wrought novel which, for all its understated, filigree texture, reverberates in the mind with poetic force. The record of Kathleen’s passage from life into the not-life is at once tragic and affirmative. “No matter, she was moving through a sacred theatre where gods and humans transformed into each other, as if they shared one essence, the immortal and the transient interfused.”

• Passage by Colin Thubron is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.