First published 2021
A graduate student arrives in the city to study Gothic nudes and rents an apartment from Agnes, a painter who supposedly lives elsewhere with her husband. When Agnes unexpectedly appears and moves into the upstairs studio, the student becomes an unwilling observer of her landlord's decline. Their encounters in hallways, cafes, and the kitchen reveal Agnes as a woman spinning increasingly frantic tales about her past while creating nothing but white paint smeared on white canvas. Her art remains perpetually unfinished, her stories grow more scattered, and it becomes apparent she may have nowhere else to go. The student maintains clinical distance while researching human forms by day and witnessing human breakdown by night. Agnes's disintegration forces both women to confront how quickly stability can crumble and how thin the line between creative inspiration and mental collapse really is.
Genres: art, literary-fiction, contemporary, psychological-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: slow-burn, unreliable-narrator
Setting: City
Period: Contemporary
192 pages · Hardcover · Riverhead Books
Content warnings: mental-illness