The Muse

London, July 1967. Odelle Bastien has lived in the city for five years since leaving Trinidad, and she has not yet found where she fits. Then she is offered a typist's job at the Skelton gallery, working under Marjorie Quick.

Quick is glamorous and enigmatic. She draws Odelle into her confidence and brings out abilities Odelle did not know she had, yet she herself stays a mystery. The mystery deepens when a lost painting with a secret history arrives at the gallery.

The truth about that painting lies decades earlier, in 1936, at a large house in rural Spain. Olive Schloss, daughter of a renowned art dealer, lives there with her family and nurtures ambitions of her own.

The household is fragile and calm until Isaac Robles, an artist and revolutionary, arrives with his half-sister Teresa. The two quickly work their way into the Schloss family, and the consequences are violent and damaging.

The novel moves between the two periods, London in the late sixties and Spain in the thirties, and links them through the canvas. Art, identity, love, obsession and deception all shape what the painting turns out to be.