Asunder
By: Chloe Aridjis
Edition: First Mariner books edition.
Publisher: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9780544003460
Subjects: Art museums; Private Police; Fiction
Description: 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.