Can it be said that anyone is sane, that anyone is healthy - or does all life consist of degrees of illness and madness? Is love a kind of madness? Is grief an illness? Is art whatever we say it is, or are there limits? Can murder be art? These and many other questions hover around Siri Hustvedt's third novel, a compassionate and gripping drama.

The novel tells the story of Leo Hertzberg, an art historian at Columbia University whose life is changed when he buys a painting by Bill Wechsler and is drawn into the contemporary New York art scene. As he and Bill become friends, their histories are inextricably entwined, their personal and professional preoccupations mirroring each other in an interlocking story of family intimacies, tragedy and alienation that spreads across more than 20 years.

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