Hadrian the Seventh

George Arthur Rose, a failed candidate for the priesthood living in a bedsit with his cat and his unpaid bills, is visited by two bishops, ordained, taken to Rome, and elected Pope. Rolfe called himself Baron Corvo and never forgave the Church for expelling him from two seminaries; this is his revenge and his self-portrait, and it is one of the strangest performances in English — vain, magnificent, and unanswerable. Fifty-four plates of quiet interiors and London streets by Hammershøi and Sickert give the novel's hothouse solitude its visual echo.