I must firstly apologise for the amount of time it has taken me to provide a review of this book, my health was rather bad for quite some time, something that had me in hospital on numerous occasions and simply didnt leave me with the time I once had to do what I love most.

Unfortunately that does mean I have missed the archive date for many of these books, so It would feel unjust throwing any review together without being able to pay attention to each novel properly.

However, I am now back to reading as before and look forward to sharing my honest reviews as always going forward. I thank you f0r the patience and understanding throughout x

Not my usual choice of book but I have to admit I did throughly enjoy reading it. The writing style flowed and it was well written.
Thank you to both NetGalley and publishers for gifting me this book

As much as I loved reading this book, the main character Eve Laing is not a character to like. She’s self-centred, driven and oblivious to anything other than her work. She’s an artist,, but better known as the muse to an infamous male artist, much to her disgust.

Eve seems to be set on self-destruction, and over the course of a night walk through London (she’s braver than me!) from her former family home to the studio she now lives in, Eve tells her story. She’s an unlikeable and unreliable narrator. I will admit that I did feel some sympathy for her when her young lover shows his true colours.

And I kept thinking: why shouldn’t she want more? Because she’s married? Because she’s in her 60’s? Because she’s a mother? She’s clearly not a happy person and envies the life she imagines that she could have had.

I don’t think I’m giving too much away when I say that this is a book that can’t end well. And it may well say something about me when I say that I rather liked the ending.

Nightshade is one of those books you get consumed by, Compulsively devouring it so you know the whole story, then googling them to see if the characters actually exist as they and their stories feel so true and real, you feel like you are reading a real life memoir and not a fiction novel.

Intelligent and impressive and really economic writing ... reflecting on her life from young (perhaps) feckless life to marriage to successful architect and the child bearing that she sees stalling her own life as artist .. along with trophy wife self absenting herself .. throwing it all over for her own plant- focused painting themes .. in comparison with former great c friend who films lives as her projects .. she's now taken a young lover who specialises in betrayals. The trajectory is full of tropes we read of women's lives being over-turned .. a bit of melodrama is perhaps this intelligent works main flaw. But very adept

This strange and painful novel will certainly carry resonances for women of a certain age, but with its deep exploration of the nature of art and its marketing and also of controlling personal relationships it will be relevant to a much, much wider readership. Eve an older artist will walk across London the city of her adulthood. As she absorbs the changes she will reflect back on the previous and her life in those places. First as an art student with her group of female friends, then as “muse” to a sexually demanding, and abusive, older male artist. Then trying to establish herself before achieving recognition with her first “Floriegium cycle” of detailed paintings of flowers. Facing her losses as that style then goes out of fashion and so do her sales. Then marriage of twenty years to Kristof an architect. He will privately question the value and quality of her art, but as he becomes successful, working internationally, he will be more intent on using her as the public trophy wife in his public appearances. This will cause increased animosity as it cuts across time for her to develop her art. Especially, finally, as her detailed depictions of plants now chime with the new eco-conscious media. Eve too is an internationally recognised artist with an increasing number of commissions.
But five months earlier Eve had chosen to leave home to work more fully in her studio on a huge new commission. Kristof is furious; he now has a young mistress living in Eve’s home and is planning to asset strip Eve through a divorce process. She is deeply invested in her new project – another floriegium of toxic plants spanning the colours of the rainbow. Her experienced team of helpers in place she is approached by Luka an unsuccessful artist who is “researching a doctorate on”. We will see him finagle his way into her art project, and increasingly controlling Eve, eject all her other support and make himself essential to her work. But it turns out he is monitoring all she says and has a deeper plan of deception and abuse.
Without acting as a spoiler, one can only say the novel will show how, through the use of modern media and playing on current “concerns” he tries to destroy Eve’s reputation - her great inspiration, but her income and effective livelihood too. The how and why must be left to the reader to be found out. But it should be said that watching it evolve makes for a compelling read, even as the reader becomes aware of the increasing levels of the abuse and is left with the feeling of watching an imminent car crash, only to find it is even worse. Eve’s focus on her art to the exclusion of anything else is both believable and riveting.
Step back a little; it is of course the challenges for women of balancing both the personal and working life over the last forty years or so. This is just one example of how even a seemingly successful life might have, and will, play out. There is of course no “right” way to live just a series of compromise to achieve the best. Eve previously subject to more subtle marital pressures and control cannot see the most blatant control techniques of her younger stalker that one would hope any sane woman would spot – but undoubtedly don’t. Layer that with the complications of trying to establish a career as an artist. The need to balance one’s own choices and skills with a fickle and changing market that works to different rules and values. Add the issue of “values” that can now with modern media and instantaneous righteousness change overnight. Work places can now be a “foreign land” too for those of a certain age trained in other ways.
So this is the novel that through one woman, not perfect, asks a series of much deeper question of how people live their lives, for better or worse. How they balance the important with the anodyne and ultimately how much freedom and security they have in this rapidly changing world.

I was totally captivated by Nightshade. It's told in retrospect by lead character, Eve. She was once, 40 years ago, an artist's muse and is now herself an artist. She has started an affair with a younger man, despite being married. The story looks at both the breakdown of the marriage and Eve's ever more fragile mental state.

I like how Eve isn't a character who's out for people to like her (including the reader), she's actually very callous in parts and might not be what everyone is looking for in a lead character, but for pushing the comfort zone boundaries, I enjoyed reading Nightshade.

This book for me was a bit of a slow burner, took a while to engage with the characters and really start to care about what was going on - I will however add it picked up a lot right near the end.

Eve is an artist, in her 60s now and beyond her heyday, she's just ditched her husband for a young lover, an assistant who's helping her pull together a new work. As her other studio assistants leave and she's left with just the lover in the studio, it's clear there's some kind of plot going on, but exactly what and how it will all fall out is not clear, and this is the most exciting part of the read.

Despite having absolutely no interest in art, or perhaps because I have no interest in art, I love books about the art world, so I was drawn to this.

Nightshade takes a long time to get going. It follow Eve, an artist, through London during one night as she reflects on the life she has led to get here. She reflects on her follow artists, particularly friend-cum-rival, Wanda, who has become a successful performance artist, and on her life after leaving her husband for Luka, a young artist.

To be honest, I was struggling with this. I found myself switching off to a the art detail and even by the end I wasn’t completely sure what Eve’s final project was. But reviews told me to stick with it and I am glad I did as it gets very juicy at the end, but I wish it had had a bit more of the juice throughout and perhaps a bit more of a build - I felt like the final couple of chapters came out of nowhere.

In the end I had a good time, but I definitely struggled with this one. 3.5 stars

Eve Laing is finally, at the age of 60, achieving her artistic potential with her most impressive artwork. However, as in the past, her sexuality is her undoing as she begins a relationship with young assistant Luka. She abandons everything to be with him and consumed by her art. Suddenly everything she has worked for all her life begins to unravel dramatically. We see her arch rival, and former flatmate Wanda Wilson and the notoriety she has achieved with her unorthodox, dramatic life art. Can Eve and her floral art achieve the same fame? Will she continue to be overshadowed? As she leaves husband, millionaire architect Kristof, and the book begins with her looking back, it is never going to end well. Only as the end drew near did i see what was going to happen. This book wasn't for me - too much description so I skipped over huge chunks. #netgalley #nighshade

I think it's an interesting story and liked the style of writing but struggled with the very slow pace and the story didn't keep my attention.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Nightshade by Annalena McAfee is an engrossing story of artist Eve who became known for an artwork completed in her early career, as well as her relationship with a much older renowned painter.

As she journeys through London returning to her studio, Eve contemplates her life's achievements and relationships with her art graduate contemporaries and her significant lovers. We also learn about Eve's latest project which provides a new lease of life to her artistic career as private collectors bid for her work.

I was hooked after the first few pages; Eve's obvious conflict with her husband Kristof, the genuine supporting characters but I didn't see that ending coming at all!!

This is essentially a one night novel, travelling through London with Eve, a floral artist, while she slips in and out of memories and past events. In the present, Eve gives an unfeeling anthropological view of London and its inhabitants, which only adds to the impression of her being a bad person, a character that it’s impossible to like. While I can handle and appreciate an unlikeable protagonist, there were bits of Eve’s personality that I felt icky about, like the misgendering of a friend’s trans child and her worries about terrorism on public transport. The story meanders, picking up pace towards the end, going into thriller territory meaning that I was left wondering what had just happened.

Eve Laing, once the muse of an infamous painter, is now - forty years later = an artist herself. But she has sacrificed her career for her family and she resents the global success of her old college roommate, a celebrity of the conceptual art scene. When Eve embarks on her most ambitious work yet, she takes a wrecking ball to her marriage for a beautiful young lover, a drifter half her age, who seems to share her single-minded creative vision.

Eve Laing goes back to her home of five months ago only to find that her husband, Kristof Axness, has moved on. As she travels back home on the tube, it gives her time to reflect on life before she took a lover.

It took me a little while to get into this book as it's a bit of a slow burner. The story is mostly told in flashbacks. The protagonist is a complex character of whom my opinion of her changed all the time. Eve can be despicable, cruel and judgemental. The pace does pick up towards the end of the book. I did enjoy the story, I just wish there had been more happening in the first half.

I would like to thank #NetGalley #RandomHouseUk #Vintage for my ARC of #Nightshade in exchange for an honest review.

Botanical artist Eve Laing takes a walk to her home of five months ago and through the window sees her ex-husband Kristof Axness has already moved a young replacement into the home. As she walks and travels on The Tube she reflects on her life and home before the carnage caused by taking a lover half her age. She assesses whether it has been worth taking a wrecking ball to her previously comfortable life. This is a novel surrounded by art but it’s about envy from several quarters, betrayal on several fronts and a huge heap of revenge.

Her memories and reflections come to us in third person narrative and they aren’t necessarily linear. The flashbacks on her life are very revealing as are her thoughts about the people she encounters on travels through London and she shows herself to be superior, judgemental, very dismissive, a snob and an egotistical and very angry woman, she’s most certainly a narcissist and clearly therefore not at all likeable but I doubt we are meant to like her. You definitely start out hating her but as the novel progresses your attitude towards her softens - a tiny bit! Her early recollections as an artists muse to Florian Kis is interesting and this is often all people want to know about her which she tries to dismiss. The pace of the novel until the last twenty percent is very slow, in fact it has the pace of the proverbial snail. The language the author uses is at times obtuse, it is as if she’s swallowed a dictionary and spits out the contents. It seems to me she’s trying extremely hard to be literary but it comes across as pretentious and overblown like the plants she draws when they become blousy. However, I do wonder if the language is deliberately constructed that way especially since this is about the art world and when you reflect on art critics (I could name some but will refrain) and what comes out of their mouths it could equally be a reflection of that! Maybe a choice then .....which seriously made me consider DNF’ing at one point but plough on.

Once Eve meets Luka, her young lover, it does pick up some pace as their passion wrecks the lives around them. Luka is hard to figure out, he’s certainly disruptive in more ways than one. Luka seems to be symbolic of how success has overtaken everything in Eve’s life to the exclusion of all else, it gives her life purpose and meaning. The final part is really good but it takes a circuitous route to get there. You hold your breath as you watch the car crash her life becomes and this part is full of surprises. However, despite all the disaster she still seems to think her art legacy is secure. This part of the book saves the novel from a two star rating.

Overall, it’s very different, I can’t say I love the book or even particularly like it but I can most certainly appreciate parts of it.

With thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK / Vintage for the arc in return for an honest review.

Eve is a successful artist exploring the natural world through experimental botanical studies. For this she is both lauded and sneered at. She has been a muse and a wife and mother, and is embarking on her most challenging and toxic work yet. Everything is disturbed when she falls for a much younger man, threatening her life and livelihood.
The double standards existing in her world and ours lead to a spiralling downwards of her reputation and her private life. The nightshade of the title is indeed deadly, and we witness the catastrophic unravelling of her life leading to a momentous finale. The writing is very engaging and well researched, giving us in depth details of the science behind the art. None of the characters is particularly likeable, Eve included, and like her namesake she is the carrier of the forbidden fruit, poisonous to the last.

Envy, betrayal and revenge.

Eve reflects on her loves and art career during a nocturnal wander across London.

A snail-slow starter. The trying-too-hard-to-be-literary writing style overwhelms the plot which veers towards a rather satisfying melodramatic denouement.

If you need your fictional characters to be likeable, to be the sort of people that you can “root for”, then absolutely do NOT read Nightshade by Annalena McAfee. If, on the other hand, you want characters to be interesting, complex, and perhaps even illustrative of deeper themes to do with the tension between art and life, then read on. I’ve got a good one for you.

Eve is not likeable. Not at all. She’s cruel, judgmental, self-absorbed… and, as the novel progresses, we come to realise that she’s treated her friends and family in quite despicable ways.

And, to make things more challenging, Nightshade is written from a tight third-person viewpoint. So we spend all 300 pages in the company of this cruel, judgmental, self-absorbed, over-privileged London artist, seeing the world through her cold cynical eyes, putting up with her mean-spirited jibes at everyone around her, marvelling at her enormous capacity for self-pity and her inability to feel a jot of compassion for others.

But then, just as I thought the novel was going to be difficult to finish, I began to realise that it was heading in a very interesting direction. Annalena McAfee has immersed us in this person’s head, I think, because she wants us to explore what it looks like when the striving for artistic success begins to take over from life itself.

This is why unlikeable characters are important in literary fiction. They allow us to explore the mistakes and missteps, to see the consequences of a certain life choice—in this case the prioritisation of artistic success over all other aspects of life—played out to their fullest extent.

The beauty of a tight third-person narrative is the ambiguity over who is actually telling us this story and what they really think of the events. It’s easy to start to equate author with narrator and think, “Wow, Annalena McAfee has some pretty cynical judgments about young people, social media, artists, homeless people, and pretty much everyone.” But no, it’s Eve who dismisses her daughter as a “social media virtue signaller”, it’s Eve who insists on calling her friend’s transgender son by his female birth name, it’s Eve who refers to “a benighted corner of North Africa”. And yet this is not Eve’s story either. It’s told in the third person, but through Eve’s eyes.

If this were a straight first-person narrative, I think it would be easier to see Eve as an unreliable narrator early on, and much of the pleasure of the book would be lost. But it’s not—it can’t be, for reasons that become clear at the end. It’s written in the third-person voice that we’ve often come to associate with distance and objectivity, but which in Nightshade is as unreliable as it gets.

Essentially, we’re being tricked into seeing things from Eve’s point of view, grudgingly accepting her breezy judgments on the people around her. And then we start to realise that it’s all false. Everything. We’ve been seeing the world through the eyes of a narcissistic sociopath, and we need to rebel against this narrative if we’re going to discover the truth.

For example, Eve is brutally critical of her daughter, the “gluten-intolerant, humbug-tolerant liberal” and “full-time victim with a borderline eating disorder”. She dismisses her as being just like all the other “social media virtue signallers” who “trumpeted their concerns for the planet even as they trashed it.” She even criticises her appearance regularly:

“Nancy’s hand was cold and her nails were lacquered a sickly stone grey. What was she wearing? Yellow had never suited here – it gave her a jaundiced cast.”

But, in places, the narrative of the spoilt, ungrateful daughter starts to fracture, and we start to realise that perhaps Eve was actually a terrible mother. Here’s a typically self-congratulatory description of how Eve responded to her daughter’s early drawings.

“Eve, for all her flaws as a mother, always credited her own daughter with a degree of sophistication and refused to pander to her. If Nancy’s drawing was crude or indecipherable, Eve would say so. This tougher, more honest school served Nancy well. She soon realised art of any sort was not for her.”

This is quite typical of the narrative throughout Nightshade. Eve’s parenting is breezily presented as positive (“credited her own daughter…”, “served Nancy well”), and yet it hits us with the sudden horror of a young artistic sensibility being utterly crushed.

And then, when Nancy actually appears in Eve’s studio and starts speaking and acting by herself, she is not the spoilt, whiny hypocrite we’ve been led to expect. She’s emotionally mature, and she makes a selfless and quite compassionate attempt to save her parents’ marriage (and to save Eve herself from self-destructing). And then you start to go back over the book, and you think, “Maybe Nancy is constantly in therapy not because she’s whiny and self-absorbed but because her mother was a monster.”

As readers, we need to do a lot of reassessment towards the end of the book. Maybe her godson drifted into an unsuccessful, unhappy life not because he “didn’t have the backbone” but because he was betrayed by an adult he looked up to. Maybe her old artist friend Wanda really was traumatised by Eve stealing two of her boyfriends, even though the narrative presents it all as justified because Wanda’s relationships with the men were not that serious. Maybe her two suicide attempts were not “shams” or the results of her “monstrous self-pity” but an expression of real pain. Maybe getting Mike drunk after a year of sobriety and then making out with him at Wanda’s performance art was not “Eve’s duty, as a serious artist, to test the hypothesis”. Maybe it was unspeakably cruel. Maybe we can’t trust anything we’ve read, and we need to think about it for ourselves, and maybe that’s a good thing for any reader to do.

Nightshade works structurally because of this clever undercutting of the narrative, and it works thematically by exploring some fascinating ideas about art and life.

Should art be cut off from life? Eve certainly thinks so. She wants art to be pure, to be about beauty and aesthetics, about “purity of purpose”. She paints incredibly detailed flowers, and she views it as “dismayingly crass” when her young boyfriend Luka asks if her new work on poisonous flowers has any connection with the recent Russian poisonings:

“No it does not,” she said firmly. “Because then it would be journalism, not art.”

And it’s not only art that should be cut off from life, but artists themselves. Eve’s old mentor/seducer, Florian Kiš, used to say that when you start to paint, the studio is crowded, not just with the sitter and the assistants, but also with the ghosts of your family, friends, enemies, critics, etc.

“Then you start to paint and they all begin to leave, one by one, shutting the door gently behind them until you’re left standing there, finally alone – just you and the work.”

As someone who’s been battling with the creative process for a long time, I can understand that. You do need to carve out time, to be solitary, to refuse invitations, to lock yourself away in a small room and tell people you love that you’re just not available for a few hours.

But then, when you’ve finished the work, you need to let the world back in. Kiš acknowledged this:

“And then, if it goes well, you leave the studio too, and shut the door behind you.”

This is the part that Eve doesn’t seem to get. For her, it’s all about the work, and friends and family are collateral damage or inconveniences to be overcome. After Nancy’s birth, “in a retrospective rage”, she insisted that her husband Kristof have a vasectomy:

“Never again. From now on, she would focus on work.”

She is harshly judgmental of her old friend, Mara, who “succumbed” to motherhood. And she closes herself off not only from friends and family, but from the wider world too. Other people, whether passers-by or remembered acquaintances, seem to exist for Eve only as sources of ridicule or fodder for cynical witticisms.

There are several scenes in the book where Eve encounters homeless people, and she just ignores them—not even a refusal or a shake of the head. She doesn’t even acknowledge their existence as human beings. Only at the very end, when things have changed for her and she’s perhaps getting a spark of self-awareness, does she stop and chat to a homeless woman in a humane way. Because yes, Eve, maybe their pain is real too. Maybe it’s all real, all the things you’ve dismissed because they’re too painful to deal with. Maybe their poverty is connected to your wealth, their under-privilege to your over-privilege. Maybe it’s all connected, and maybe you were the problem all along, and your cynical barbs were a way of deflecting that.

The way Eve cuts herself off from everyone in her pursuit of creative fulfilment reminds me of something Stephen King wrote in his memoir/writing book On Writing, when he talked about recovering from being an alcoholic and almost destroying his family. As a symbol of his new priorities, he replaced his huge old desk with a smaller one in the corner of the room: “Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way round.”

Nightshade is also a book about success and the striving for it. Here’s yet another staggeringly cruel thing that Eve says about her daughter (or, to be more accurate, that the narrator says through Eve’s viewpoint):

“Of all the curses that might be visited on one’s children, the cruellest was mediocrity.”

Anyone with a normal job, in Eve’s eyes, falls into the category of mediocrity. So it’s a curse that afflicts the majority of people on the planet. But those people don’t matter, of course—not to Eve. What matters is that her daughter be brilliant, successful, admired, and she’s disappointed in her for “failing”. Her godson Theo and others also get tarred with the “mediocrity” brush.

But people more famous than Eve also come in for some bitter criticism. Her old friend Wanda, who is wildly successful, is “despicable”, “a fraud”, “a sham”, and a whole lot more. When referring to Wanda’s fame, Eve recalls Florian Kiš’s old dictum that fame was “a cheap trick of the light.” But she hates Florian Kiš too, and the way everyone keeps asking about him instead of her.

Eve’s predicament—contempt for those below her, hatred of those above—reminds me of a quote I love from the Tao te Ching: “Success is as dangerous as failure. Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky.”

Eve expresses a lot more opinions about art throughout the book, as well as about feminism, sexuality, and a lot more. And the good thing about the way Nightshade is written is that we get to evaluate and then re-evaluate them just as we re-evaluate the events of the book. Do we agree with Eve or reject her position as our trust in her crumbles? Let the reader decide!

There’s a nice recurring image in Nightshade that I think ties together a lot of what I’ve been saying in this review. It appears in the opening scene of the book, when Eve is basically stalking her estranged husband, standing in the dark west London street and looking up at the brightly lit windows of the houses and the tableaus of life inside. In each house, she finds something to criticise within the tight confines of the illuminated frame.

Later, when she’s at a Tube station, a similar image recurs:

“The train rattles past, each window a bright frame of film reel with its own starring cast and complicated backstory, before creaking to a halt.”

And later still:

“A night bus flashes past, each lit window framing an Edward Hopper profile – thumbnail studies of urban loneliness.”

This is Eve’s fatal flaw. She reduces people to simple thumbnail images, like slides in a carousel. She stands back and watches them from the outside, from the darkness, forever the critical observer. If she could just plunge in and relate to people as people, as a daughter, a husband, a friend, and put aside the judgments and the need to paint a picture of them for the critical appraisal of an external viewer, then maybe she would have had a happier life. Maybe she would have been more likeable too, and some readers would have been happy to find somebody to root for. But it wouldn’t have been half the novel.

I think, for Nightshade to work, Eve needed to be just the way she was.

Eve was once a muse for a famous artist, but now she is an acclaimed artist herself. Except she has jeopardized everything - her marriage, her family, her reputation - for an affair with a much younger man. 'Nightshade' is deep, and visceral, and lusciously dark, like an oil painting. This is a story of love and jealousy, art and sexuality, and at the heart of it is the question - what must we sacrifice to be true to ourselves?

I'm a little conflicted about this book. Initially, I was bowled over - incredibly smart and well written, exploring female identity, sexuality, relationships, ageing and art; all subjects of interest to me and the writing (as I already said) so clever, so original that several chapters in, the protagonist had still done no more that take a stroll to the tube station yet I was utterly hooked. Sitting in bed with my reading glasses and kindle, I would turn to my husband (already asleep), and mumble: 'This is brilliant, amazing... she reminds me of Margaret Atwood.' And in fact I remained hooked to the end. But what started to perturb me as the novel progressed was that the already unlikeable protagonist started to become frankly almost cartoonish, contemptuously scorning her weeping child and then locking herself in a physical, bloody battle with her (equally unlikable) lover. So, by the time she came to her own bitter end, I was largely unmoved. Which is, at least for me, a huge shame, because till then I'd found the novel virtually perfect.