For the first ten years of her life, Jana was a simple Czech girl, a watercolour. Her days were a clock run by the Czechoslovakian State Security, snapping hidden photos in their plainclothes. Much fervent artwork was created: Man Subverting Republic (Black and White), Woman Distributing (Tryptic). Man and Woman Organizing (Reprint).   

Jana was a watercolour, until the raven-haired girl Zorka came. Jana, now an interpreter in Paris, hasn’t seen Zorka in a decade. Aimee is in Paris too, happily married and trying to get into her hotel room. On the other side of the door is her wife Dominique, face down on the hotel linen, one hand drooping off the side of the bed, fingers curled in, wedding ring white gold like an eye frozen mid-wink. A body now, no longer a person.   

As Aimee and Jana’s stories slowly circle through time and place, they lead inexorably together…    Written with the dramatic tension of a Euripides tragedy, the dreamlike quality of a David Lynch film and the imagination of a unique talent, Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso is an audacious, mesmerising novel of love, desire, identity and belonging.