T.C. Boyle has tackled extraordinary characters in previous novels, like John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Welville and Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle but none could ever eclipse the extraordinary, complex trajectory of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Told from the point of view of a wealthy Japanese apprentice, Sato Tadashi, Boyle’s latest novel The Women is a fictional biography of Wright delineated via four of his numerous women. The novel disembarks with his last wife Olgivanna, a beautiful dancer spellbound by the Russian mystic Gudjieff, and travels back to the tabloid-frenzy years spent with a morphine-addicted southern belle, Mamah, who was paralysed with delusions of grandeur. His most significant relationship, though, is the one that temporarily ruined his promising career when he ran off with a client’s wife, Miriam.

The Women is an illuminating study of a brilliant, flawed man whose innovative gift changed the face of modern architecture but failed the women who loved him.