In Friendship's Guise

Paris, 1892. Jack Clare is an artist with a name that doesn't sell, a wife who dances at the Folies Bergère, and a rented room that grows smaller with every unpaid bill. When he sets out to deliver a copied painting, certain that this commission will finally lift the weight pressing down on his marriage, the buyer has vanished. The money evaporates. He returns home to face Diane, whose dreams have curdled into resentment, whose love has become indistinguishable from despair. This is a novel about the slow murder of romance by poverty: how financial suffocation turns tenderness into recrimination, how a couple can adore each other and still destroy one another. Graydon, writing at the century's close, captures the particular agony of artistic failure in the city most famous for celebrating art. For readers who cherish the raw naturalism of Zola or the heartbreaking poverty narratives of turn-of-the-century fiction.