Nightshade

By: Annalena McAfee

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Hardcover | 19 March 2020

At a Glance

Hardcover
304 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.8 x 16.0 x 3.0

Hardcover

RRP $35.00

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'Brilliant and biting' FT

Family life. Reputation. They took a lifetime to build and a second to wreck. Eve Laing, once the muse of an infamous painter, is now - forty years later - an artist herself. But she has sacrificed her career for her family and she resents the global success of her old college roommate, a celebrity of the conceptual art scene. When Eve embarks on her most ambitious work yet, she takes a wrecking ball to her comfortable life, jettisoning her marriage for a beautiful young lover, a drifter half her age, who seems to share her single-minded creative vision.

Nightshade charts Eve's nocturnal walk through London, from her former family home in the west of the city back to her studio, a converted factory in the east, where her recently completed masterpiece hangs and a fatal reckoning awaits.

This brilliant and timely novel explores sexual politics and the excesses of the contemporary art world, asking if the true artist must relinquish the ordinary human need for love and connection. Can the creative urge be the most destructive - even deadliest - impulse of all?

Industry Reviews

Nightshade is a glorious novel... full of twisted sexuality, art and power, about what it means to commit yourself entirely to the artistic life. The book's ending is unforgettable. -- Alex Preston * Observer *
Brilliant and biting. -- Harriet Fitch Little * Financial Times *
The drama of creation, of impending triumph or failure, and the expert rendering of the artistic process, all lift the novel to a new level...McAfee's prose is lyrical yet sharp... the novel fascinates...and Nightshade's questions continue to intrigue. -- Joanna Briscoe * Guardian *
McAfee's engaging novel combines a dark plot with a zestful skewering of the contemporary art world. -- Anthony Gardner * Mail on Sunday *
Eve is a fascinating, plausible creation, both alluring and monstrous in her all-consuming self-regard. * Metro *
[A] pacy tale of marital breakdown on the London art scene... Eve is an engagingly spiky anti-heroine. -- Anthony Cummins * Daily Mail *
Annalena McAfee brings a woman's art to such vivid life that the reader is drawn thrillingly into its creation. Art is no mere device in this novel, it is its beating heart. A lush and original novel. -- Polly Clark

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