First published 2018
A portrait painter in his thirties retreats to the mountain residence of renowned artist Tomohiko Amada after his wife leaves him. In the attic, he finds a painting that Amada kept hidden from the world. This discovery sets off a chain of strange events that draw him into a web connecting multiple worlds and timelines. A mysterious bell rings in the forest. A tiny figure materializing an abstract concept appears before him. Across the valley lives an elegant businessman with his own secrets. A bright thirteen-year-old girl enters his life. The hidden painting reveals connections to a failed plot against Nazi officials in wartime Vienna. Behind the house, a pit opens into an otherworldly realm populated by entities called Double Metaphors. The painter must navigate these intersecting mysteries to restore balance to forces he barely understands. His journey becomes one of artistic awakening and personal reckoning, where the boundaries between reality and imagination blur completely.
Genres: art, literary-fiction, mystery, fantasy, magical-realism, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Vienna
Period: Wartime
681 pages · Hardcover · Knopf