A novel about art, both the grand artistic folly and the small-scale creative triumph, and its place in our lives Italy in the early 1960s a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous And in present-day London, his daughter, an art curator, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon