Book description
Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices
and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those
closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same
objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small
group of bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and
admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme
terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his
daughter, an art curator struggling with the sudden loss of her twin
brother while trying to curate an exhibition about the lives of the
twentieth-century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness
and sexual abandon. Covering half a century, this is a luminous and
searching novel, and Hall's most accomplished work to date.
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974 and now lives and works
there. Her first novel, Haweswater, was published by Faber in 2002.
Her second, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man
Booker Prize in 2004. In 2007 Sarah won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
