Nightshade
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Engrossing...I loved each and every brushstroke' Ian Rankin
'Nightshade is a glorious novel... full of twisted sexuality, art and power' Observer
Could the creative urge be the most destructive - even the deadliest - impulse of all? Could it end in death?
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. She resents the global success of her old college roommate. She is slowly unravelling.
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 who seems to share her single-minded creative vision.
This timely novel explores sexual politics, asking if the true artist must relinquish the ordinary human need for love and connection to pave the way for desire and ambition, leading to a fatal awakening...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McAfee (Hame) centers her caustically entertaining latest on Eve, a self-aggrandizing middle-aged antiheroine obsessed with her thwarted artistic vision. Eve's story begins at the garden of her former home and unfolds on her peripatetic journey through London's unfriendly streets. The trip allows Eve to consider her ambition to be more than a "flower painter," a status gained through the two works for which she is best known: Girl with a Flower, a famous portrait featuring Eve as a youthful, submissive muse, and Underground Florilegium, Eve's "first major work... much reproduced, copied, and pirated." Now, at 60 years old, Eve acidly recollects the obstacles to her artistry exploitative friends and fellow artists, callous reviewers to whom she is mere "ape of nature," a famous husband, an insipid daughter, a disloyal assistant, a visionless agent. She also ruminates on Poison Florilegium, a painting she wishes to compose that would be "monumental in scale" and depict flowering Swiss meadows where Alpine flowers are replaced with "the deadliest plants." This, "nature's most vicious prank," would, Eve believes, redeem her and, by proxy, all of history's thwarted and overlooked women artists. The painting becomes Eve's singular, myopic focus, reawakening her passions but blinding her to the machinations of those around her. Eve's obsessive self-absorption and ambition make this a pleasing investigation of the limits of artistic influence.
