One of Peter Carey’s most searingly inventive novels yet. Wise, funny, profound.

Michael ‘Butcher’ Boone is an ex-‘really famous’ painter, now reduced to living in a remote country house and acting as caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh. Alone together they’ve forged a delicate equilibrium, a balance instantly destroyed when a mysterious young woman named Marlene walks out of a rainstorm and into their lives. Beautiful, smart, and ambitious, she’s the daughter-in-law of the late great painter Jacques Liebovitz. Soon Marlene sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making, or the ruin, of them all …