Asunder: A Novel by Chloe Aridjis

From a writer praised for her "fresh, original voice" (New York Times Book Review) and "hypnotic" prose (Junot Díaz) comes a captivating novel about two museum guards in London for whom life and art begin to overtake one another in unsettling and surreal ways. Half by chance, half by ancestral call, Marie works as a museum guard at the National Gallery in London. Amid its hushed and sedate corridors surge great currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lies 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, Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, on the eve of World War I. Drawn to such transgressors and the omens they bring with them, and after nine years at the Gallery, Marie begins to feel restless. At home she guards another, more humble collection—her handcrafted miniature landscapes—where she also re