Nightshade - Annalena McAfee

'Nightshade is a glorious novel... full of twisted sexuality, art and power' ObserverFamily life. Reputation. They took a lifetime to build and a second to wreck. 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 and she resents the global success of her old college roommate. 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, a drifter half her age, who seems to share her single-minded creative vision. This brilliant and timely novel explores sexual politics and asks if the true artist must relinquish the ordinary human need for love and connection. Can the creative urge be the most destructive - even deadliest - impulse of all?'Brilliant and biting' Financial Times