From the Man Booker Prize-winning author ofThe SeaandAncient Lighta new novel--at once trenchant witty and shattering--about the intricacies of artistic creation and theft and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another and to hold on to ourselvesEqually self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating our narrator Oliver Otway Orme is a painter of some renown and a petty thief who does not steal for profit and has never before been caught But hes pushing fifty feels like a hundred and things have not been going so well lately Having recognized the man-killing crevasse that exists between what he sees and any representation he might make of it--any attempt to make what he sees his own--hes stopped painting And his last purloined possession--aquired the last time he felt the secret shiver of bliss in thievery--has been discovered The fact that it was the wife of the man who was perhaps his best friend has compelled him to run away from his mistress his home his wife from whatever remains of his impulse to paint and from the tragedy that haunts him and to sequester himself in the house where he was born trying to uncover in himself the answer to how and why things have turned out as they did Excavating memories of family of places hes called home and of the way he has apprehended the world around him no matter what else is going on one of my eyes is always swivelling towards the world beyond Ollie reveals the very essence of a man who in some way has always been waiting to be rescued from himself.
