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Asunder

Chloe Aridjis

2013192 pagesabout 3–4 hours
2013
first published
  • 2013Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade & Reference Publishers · ENGISBN 9780544003514
  • 2013HarperCollins Publishers · ENGISBN 9780544309845
  • 2013Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade & Reference Publishers · ENGISBN 9781299903975
  • 2013Chatto & Windus · 192 pages · ENGISBN 9780701187415
  • 2013Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt · 196 pages · ENGISBN 9780544003460
  • 2013Penguin Random House · 208 pages · ENGISBN 9781448129690
  • 2014Vintage Books · ENGISBN 9780099572756
  • 2014Ulverscroft · ENGISBN 9781444819267

Marie's job as a guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War. After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open.

How do you feel?