Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and to those closest to him.. He begins his last painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career – a small group of bottles. Not long afterwards, a blind girl tends his grave, trying to understand the world she can no longer see. Years later in Cumbria, a landscape artist finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his daughter, struggling with the sudden loss of her twin brother, finds herself drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon. Covering half a century, Sarah Hall’s fourth novel is a fierce and brilliant study of art and its place in our lives.