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How to Paint a Dead Man
How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009.
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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. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career – a small group of bottles.
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 struggling with the sudden loss of her twin brother while trying to curate an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth-century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon.
Covering half a century, this is a luminous and searching novel, and Hall’s most accomplished work to date.
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. Twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize, she is the award-winning author of six novels and three short-story collections: The Beautiful Indifference, which won the Edge Hill and Portico prizes, Madame Zero, winner of the East Anglian Book Award, and Sudden Traveller, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. She is currently…
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