Olivia Glazebrook

A lost painting in a crumbling mansion

Olivia Glazebrook on a new work of art fiction

issue 19 July 2008

This is a curious book: not exactly likeable, but certainly intriguing, and definitely accomplished. It is a debut novel, but doesn’t feel like one at all. It is smart, bold and surprising, with nothing of the crowd-pleaser about it; in fact it might irritate, or disgust, just as easily as it amuses.

A disgraced professor of art history, Thomas Lynch, believes that there exists an uncatalogued painting by Giovanni Bellini, of the Madonna, and that it is hidden somewhere in a dilapidated English country house named Mawle, a house owned for generations by the Roper family. By scheming and subterfuge Lynch manages to worm his way into the house, but having rather smugly cast himself as the cunning scholar hoodwinking his philistine hosts, Lynch realises that he is the one being deceived, held captive by a combination of sexual promise and a limitless supply of grappa.

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