This took a while to get into and I almost gave up on it as nothing was happening. The literary descriptions and artistic references were a little too much. However, the pace picked up and we journey with Eve as she makes terrible decisions and her whole world, career and relationships crumble around her. A powerful and different story.

Eve Laing is an artist who works in her London studio on works based around very accurate reproductions of flowers. But she is perhaps most famous as the muse of another painter, and for moving in the same circles in the sixties and seventies as a number of other more successful artists.

She did find fame with her take flora take on the tube map, but she’s working towards her biggest piece yet.
We learn her story in flashback as she travels across London one December night, as her mind jumps around her life so far. Her life has been very exciting and not without controversies. She has had her fair share of partners, and now finds herself married to a successful architect who doesn’t pay her an enormous amount of attention. She has a daughter via another man, but their relationship isn’t what it might be.

Eve’s career is going places. She’s just had a successful gallery showing in London, and has a retrospective due to appear in New York. Meanwhile her agent is managing a bidding war amongst collectors looking to get their hands on her new work.

In her studio she has a number of assistants to help her source materials, but she is beginning to become a bit obsessed with one younger man who’s working there.

I really enjoyed this look at contemporary arts, something I know very little about. I would guess that certain people and places in this novel are not exactly heavily disguised versions of some real artists and galleries, although there are plenty of real artists and galleries that get name-checked.

I thought of some of the “fake-lives” novels of William Boyd as I read this, although the narrative is very much told from the perspective of today, as Eve thinks back to those times earlier in her life, and the actions she took.

The book absolutely captures something in an almost dreamlike way. And when Eve is turfed out of a broken-down tube train, anyone with a knowledge of central London streets can very much follow her progress across the city.

I was held to the end.

Firstly may I thank the publishers for an advance copy of this book.
This is a very different novel to those that I mostly read, but one that I have enjoyed immensely
The story is told by Eve a 60-year-old artist and is told in retrospect while she travels across London firstly by Tube and then on foot. Eve has taken a lover half her age and brought to an end her marriage to a successful architect. During this journey, Eve reflects on her life from her teenage years as an aspiring young artist through her marriage and onto her affair with the younger man which consumes her life.
It is very well written and held my attention throughout Eve's thoughts and opinions about her former friends in the art world and her family are sharp and cynical and at times witty.. This is a story not only about the breakdown of a marriage but also the gradual mental breakdown of Eve herself.
A book I am happy to recommend.

Nightshade by Annalena McAfee is described by its publishers as an intriguing, dark and thrilling piece of literary noir. It tells the story of Eve Laing, once a muse, and now a famous artist, who in her sixties falls for a much younger man. He appears to understand both her and her art, and gradually her world gets smaller and smaller until it is focussed only on him, and her most ambitious project yet.

This book is not pacey, and at times you can sense McAfee becoming overly excited about the way she is writing rather than about the story. Eve is not a terribly likable character and the art scene she inhabits is full of rivalry and ambition.

However, as I got more into it, I did enjoy the novel. It reminded me of Siri Hustvedt's 'What I loved', in both its focus on art, the style and the sense that this is a thriller, but not a thriller. I got caught up in the book and wanted to read to the end, and having finished it, Eve's character and the world she inhabits has stayed with me. Therefore I wouldn't buy this novel if what you are after is excitement or something pacey, but I would if what you'd like is a a book about the female experience of the art world and the rivalries within.

Eve, a middling artist, gives in to temptation. Eve starts an ill advised affair with Luka. He is her assistant and half her age. Eve is, frankly, a terrible person. She embodies many of the seven deadly sins and has no empathy. Eve's treatment of her daughter, Nancy, is disgusting. Her treatment of her two old friends, Mara and Wanda is vile. Amusingly, Eve has no idea of her flaws. She has no idea of the damage she has done.
Nightshade is a great revenge novel. Eve's monstrous ego blinds her to the long game someone else is playing. It also deftly skewers the relationship between the art world and the super rich. Eve has nothing but contempt for it's largely fuelled by her jealousy at failing to make the cut.

I’m afraid I gave up on Nightshade fairly early, which I seldom do. I just couldn’t be doing with a somewhat self-consciously “literary” novel about wealthy, arty people in London and there wasn’t enough content here to keep me going.

Eve is a successful botanical artist who was married to an extremely successful (and therefore rich) architect before things began to go horribly wrong. She is walking through London at night, thinking abut things...and walking and thinking and reminiscing and walking. I found it a forced device which became increasingly irritating. Not only that, what Eve was thinking about didn’t interest me much, either. Her life in New York, her gorgeous little place in Wales and so on, and then the rather self-obsessed way she destroyed it all and the “excesses of the contemporary art world”, as the blurb has it. None of it engaged me at all, nor did I find much original in what was being said.

The prose is just that bit too mannered and has a sense of giving the reader coy little glances every so often to make sure we’re noticing how terribly clever it is. For example, Eve stopping thinking about gardening in Wales is described as “Eve cast herself out of the garden, like her original namesake, turning her back on Arcadia to walk naked in the wilderness…”. It’s overdone for me, and I know it’s a metaphor, but “naked in the wilderness” doesn’t really work when she’s actually walking in London, warmly dressed at midnight near Christmas, does it? Or, in a paragraph beginning “There are so many ways of measuring a life,” we get this: “Velocity was another calculation – from the langorous slo-mo of childhood, cranking up to the adolescent’s brisk, bright Super-8 narrative, accelerating on to the breathless blur of old age, swift as a blink-and-you’ll-miss it credit sequence.” There’s a lot of this, and although I see what she means, it’s not very original and seems very contrived to me, from the unsubtle alliteration to “Super-8 narrative.”

Enough. I didn’t like it. I tried it partly because of warm endorsements from some fine writers; this was before I discovered that Annalena McAfee has been a literary editor at both the Guardian and The Financial Times, which may mean that the endorsements are possibly not quite as disinterested and objective as one may wish. Anyway, it certainly wasn’t for me.

(My thanks to Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)

A chilling portrayal of art and the passion that overtakes artist Eve’s life. The story begins with Eve taking a walk across London one night and contemplating her life and the actions that led her to this point. A younger lover, a family ripped apart....was it worth it?

Eve is a character with seemingly pent up anger and you find yourself in the position of not knowing whether you are supposed to like her or not. Or is that part of the story as it evolves?

This book was a little of a slow burner at first but the pace and intensity definitely builds towards the end.

We see the story build in flashbacks and covers some issues that many in society will recognise.

I enjoyed the ending as it wasn’t how I expected it. I love it when those conclusions just creep up on me!

You will likely want to Google Eve to see if she is a real person!

Thank you to Random House UK, Vintage and Netgalley for an ARC of this story in exchange for my honest review.

My thanks to Annalena McAfee, Random House and Net Galley for the ARC of NIGHTSHADE.
I was holding my breath the whole time I was reading this incredible novel, so worried for artist Eve Laing as she's walking the dark streets of London alone and also as she walks towards disaster in her personal life. The reader is placed in the position almost of watching her through a lense. As a woman of a similar age I kept saying no no no, what are you thinking, but...she did it anyway. Compelling and helplessly stomach churning. I loved it.