Synopsis
Having won a Gold Medal at the prestigious Salon for his painting Charging Chasseur - completed at the tender age of twenty-one - Gericault finds himself, seven years later, distracted and lovesick due to his secret affair with his benefactor-uncle’s young wife, Alexandrine, still desperately searching for the subject of his next tableau. Then, at the house of his neighbour, he hears about the French frigate Medusa, shipwrecked off the shores of the West African coast.
With tales of betrayal, madness, murder and cannibalism, this was a catastrophe that horrified the French public - and Gericault is duly fascinated. When he manages to track down two of the raft’s survivors and invites them to his home to discover what really happened during those fifteen days at sea, Gericault knows he has finally found his subject.
Praise for The Company
‘Pitched somewhere between Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies, this is a thoroughly diabolical tale in the best sense’ Daily Mail
‘We’re led into the mind of a marooned madman via a lapidary, first-person prose style that speaks vividly to the senses. Nimbly balanced on a tightrope of acute intelligence and ruthless psychopathy’ Time Out
‘Edge is almost as good as Patrick O’Brian in her re-creation of life on a sailing ship...A second novel please. And soon’ The Times
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Review
'Arabella Edge describes the extremes of human emotion here with empathy and panache...It’s an unusual and enlightening read’ -- Warren Brewer, Mercury Magazine
'There is a sense of immutable patterns of cyclical injustice, inequality and occasional reform.' -- Age
'You come away from it thinking of art, politics and the sheer strangeness of things’ -- Age
'immensely enjoyable retelling of facts so sensational as to barely require fictional embellishment' -- Art Quarterly
gave The Raft its top vote for the best read -- France Magazine
‘A combination of fable, thriller and comedy of manners. It is a rich, florid and pacy novel’ -- The Daily Telegraph –summer reading
‘Award-winning author Arabella Edge’s brilliant and original second novel...Page-turning and substantial, a rare combination’ -- Daily Mail
‘The Raft is an illuminating account of appalling events and people pushed to extremes’ -- Times Literary Supplement
‘The writing takes on a compelling vividness that keeps the pages turning' -- Age
Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Company comes a new novel about the life of the artist Theodore Gericault.
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