The Lady Waiting
A Novel
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
“A breakneck romp of a novel with a stolen Vermeer, a tangled love triangle, a half-baked heist and enough depraved opulence to make Gatsby gasp.” —People
“This novel pops— Cosmopolitan, sexy, and funny.” —Percival Everett, New York Times-bestselling author of James
The White Lotus meets The Talented Mr. Ripley in this high-spirited novel of a stolen Vermeer, a Polish transplant in LA, and the charismatic couple who seduce her into a misguided international heist
One bright Los Angeles day, a young Polish émigré named Viva is driving along the freeway when she’s flagged down by a dazzling, disheveled woman in green chiffon. The woman is Bobby Sleeper, a fellow Eastern European and an erstwhile art gallerist with a mysterious background and even more mysterious filmmaker husband. Within days the couple hire Viva as their assistant, then enlist her as an accomplice in an improbable scheme involving a long-lost Vermeer masterwork, a multi-million-dollar reward, and several shadowy ex-husbands.
As Bobby and her husband weave her ever more tightly into their web, Viva is swept up in an escapade that’s one part art heist, one part love triangle, and one part education of a felon. Entranced by their lifestyle, alarmed by their ramshackle scam, Viva realizes she’s out of her depth—and that only luck, cunning, and her own hustler’s instinct can save her from disaster. Careening from the canyons of LA to the canals of Venice, The Lady Waiting is a page-turning caper, a cavalcade of twenty-first-century sins—rapacious capitalism, shameless fraud, and atrocious behavior—and a showcase for three of the biggest and most unforgettable characters in recent fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zyzak (The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel) returns with a rollicking tale of sex, money, and art theft. One afternoon in Los Angeles, Polish immigrant Wioletta picks up a glamorous hitchhiker, a woman named Bobby Sleeper. Wioletta introduces herself as Viva, and Bobby offers her a job as her live-in assistant. Bobby; her retired filmmaker husband, Sebastian; and their flamboyant houseguest, a playwright named Lance, introduce Viva to sprezzatura ("the art of studied nonchalance," Lance explains). She quickly takes to their glitzy lifestyle, striking up sexual relationships with both Sebastian and Bobby, the latter of whom uses Viva as an accomplice to "fake-steal" a valuable Vermeer from her ex-husband, a Russian oligarch. The painting itself is missing from a German museum, and Bobby and the oligarch have a scheme going to split the multimillion-dollar reward for its safe return. Things take a turn, however, when one of Bobby's other ex-husbands, Łyski, sneaks into her home, steals the painting from her closet, and absconds with it to Italy. Zyzak constructs a playful narrative, shuttling characters across the globe and into each other's beds, and she takes advantage of Bobby's loose-cannon nature to raise the stakes again and again. This is great fun.
