Book description
A forthright investigation of human frailty and emotion with a plot
that keeps you in its thrall until the last word. Greer Gordon lives in
Italy with Mischa Svoboda, a driven Czech-born painter with a booming
international reputation. She and Mischa met in the 1970s, when his
debut show at the small Melbourne art gallery where Greer then worked
created a sensation. He was unknown at the time, a recently arrived
refugee from Prague. Their explosive love affair caused Greer to abandon
her husband, job and autocratic boss Verity, sever all contact with home
and embark on a nomadic life with Mischa. Twenty-five years later, Tony,
a young American art critic, has been researching a biography of Mischa
and arrives in the small Italian hilltop community where they now live.
Greer is consumed by anxiety, fearing  the biographer may have
unearthed something that happened as a consequence of her meeting
Mischa, a buried secret she had intended to write out of her life story.
Greer and Tony play out a gripping cat-and-mouse game in which she tries
to glean who he has spoken to and what, if anything, he knows, while he
lets drop, with calculated casualness, graded snippets of information
designed to keep her guessing. It becomes clear that Tony is
manipulating a dramatic outcome for the purposes of his story. It will
be an investigative read in which the reader discovers the facts as the
biographer-detective unravels them. The biographer intends to make his
name with this book. As her hand is forced, Greer embarks on a tense
journey of her own. In revisiting the past from the perspective of the
present, through Tony's artful interrogations and her own diary, she is
compelled to put her youthful self on trial. In the process she makes a
life-changing discovery. Virginia Duigan wrote the screenplay of the
1998 movie The Leading Man, starring Jon Bon Jovi, Thandie Newton and
Barry Humphries. Before becoming a novelist, Duigan worked as a
journalist, broadcaster, editor and TV scriptwriter. She was a regular
feature writer on The National Times, and contributed documentaries to
ABC radio. She was a freelance contributor to The Bulletin, The Age, The
Australian, The Financial Review, Cinema Papers, and in London to the
The Observer and The Times. She was Literary Editor of The National
Times, and a theatre, book, film and restaurant reviewer. She has
written three novels; The Precipice, Days Like These and The Biographer.
