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Nightshade

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Family life. Reputation. It took a lifetime to build and a second to wreck. Only her work remains.

Eve Laing, once the muse of an infamous painter, is now — forty years later — an artist herself. But she feels she has sacrificed her career for her family and she resents the global success of her old college roommate, now a celebrity of the international conceptual art scene. When Eve embarks on her most ambitious work yet, she takes a wrecking ball to her comfortable life, jettisoning her marriage for a beautiful young lover, a drifter half her age, who seems to share her single-minded creative vision.

Nightshade charts Eve’s nocturnal walk through London, from her former family home in the west of the city back to her studio, a converted factory in the east, where her recently completed masterpiece hangs and a fatal reckoning awaits.

This brilliant and timely novel explores sexual politics and the excesses of the contemporary art world, asking if the true artist must relinquish the ordinary human need for love and connection. Can the creative urge be the most destructive — even deadliest — impulse of all?

© Annalena McAfee 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 City Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Urban Women's Fiction Inspiring England

Critic reviews

Nightshade is a glorious novel... full of twisted sexuality, art and power, about what it means to commit yourself entirely to the artistic life. The book's ending is unforgettable. (Alex Preston)
Brilliant and biting. (Harriet Fitch Little)
The drama of creation, of impending triumph or failure, and the expert rendering of the artistic process, all lift the novel to a new level...McAfee’s prose is lyrical yet sharp… the novel fascinates…and Nightshade’s questions continue to intrigue. (Joanna Briscoe)
McAfee’s engaging novel combines a dark plot with a zestful skewering of the contemporary art world. (Anthony Gardner)
Eve is a fascinating, plausible creation, both alluring and monstrous in her all-consuming self-regard.
[A] pacy tale of marital breakdown on the London art scene… Eve is an engagingly spiky anti-heroine. (Anthony Cummins)
Annalena McAfee brings a woman’s art to such vivid life that the reader is drawn thrillingly into its creation. Art is no mere device in this novel, it is its beating heart. A lush and original novel. (Polly Clark)
Beautifully written, engrossing and provides insights into both the contemporary art scene and the individual artistic process. I loved each and every brushstroke (Ian Rankin)
All stars
Most relevant
I’ve been listening to Nightshade every night this week, and I’m enjoying it immensely. Eve is a wonderful creation and the author’s depiction of the petty jealousies and immense egos of the art world are spot on. If I were reading the novel rather than listening to it I would be underlining some sentences—lines of cut-glass prose and precise and almost brutal observation. So often a good book is let down by the narrator but Jane Maud reads Nightshade brilliantly. Hers really is a 5-star performance, full of subtlety and nuance that makes the characters real and memorable. I’d certainly buy another audiobook voiced by this narrator.

Excellent novel, beautifully narrated

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