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About Nightshade: A Novel
Product Description A lean, taut novel about an artist--a painter--at the height of her career, about the art world, about love, fidelity, fame, betrayal, and the large choices and prices paid in the quest for art for art's sake. By the much-admired author of The Spoiler ("cutting wit and razor-sharp writing"--NYTBR; "a dark, sparkly gem of a book"--Christopher Buckley) and Hame ("I couldn't put it down"--Patrick McGrath). Eve Laing, celebrated artist, once the muse of legendary painter and "monstre sacré" Florian Kiš, is a photorealist painter of flowers at the peak of her career, with her work in international galleries and museums. Now Eve is embarking on her most ambitious work to date--seven enormous, elaborate panels of the world's deadliest plants. In psychic preparation, she has taken a wrecking ball to her opulent high-wire life, jettisoning her marriage for a beautiful young lover, a drifter half her age, who seems to share her single-minded artistic vision. As the novel opens out, Eve is on a late-night walk through London, setting out from her former family home in the well-heeled west of the city, back to her studio, a converted factory in the grittier east, where her recently completed masterpiece hangs and where a fatal reckoning may await. . . . Eve makes her way through the city and reflects on her life today and as it was years ago, and considers the large choices she has made and their repercussions. As she walks, she summons up her wild art college days in London; her New York years as a tyro artist; her vicious rivalry with her college roommate, now a celebrated figure on the international conceptual art scene whose full-blown success and recognition still infuriates and rankles Eve's sense of rightness with the world. And as she weighs what's been gained and what's been lost in pursuit of her art, a sense of dread settles over her, one she cannot shake, and as Nightshade moves to its dark, shocking end, it explores large questions--about ambition . . . artistic truth . . . betrayal . . . about bad people making good art . . . about the consequences of fame . . . and the devastating price of love. About the Author ANNALENA McAFEE was born in London and was educated at Essex University. She is the author of Hame and The Spoiler. McAfee worked in newspapers for more than three decades. She was arts and literary editor of the Financial Times and founded the Guardian Review, which she edited for six years. She lives in Gloucestershire with her husband, the writer Ian McEwan. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 Night. Winter. A city street. Eve’s footsteps echo as she walks along the broad pavement past sepulchral buildings—Georgian, stuccoed and porticoed—flanking a central garden. Wreaths of greenery on every door brag of good taste and festive fellowship but the houses are mostly in darkness. At number 19, the lights are on in the second floor, the master bedroom, giving the closed red curtains a visceral sheen. Three doors on, the ground-floor windows flicker blue—someone’s watching late-night news, dozing in comfort before grim dispatches from a disintegrating world—while in the basement a night lamp’s sickly amber glow filters through slatted blinds. Further on, at number 31, the first-floor drawing room is shamelessly bright—ugly abstracts and clunky sculpture on glaring display. A tall ficus, with viridian leaves so glossy they could be artificial, is hung with strings of coloured lights and mirrored baubles—silver planets spinning in a twinkling solar system. The room is an empty set; the actors have left the stage. This is an industrious street and they keep early hours. But at number 43 they will still be up. Kristof always said, evoking the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, that the world got more interesting round midnight. And there he is, framed in the right panel of the ground-floor window’s illuminated triptych. He’s in profile, sitting in the leather armchai
