Asunder

Chloe Aridjis

Random House, May 2, 2013 - Fiction - 208 pages

Marie’s job as a museum 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 surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belie their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the warder 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 apart.

About the author

Chloe Aridjis was born in New York, and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico City. She received her DPhil in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from Oxford, then lived in Berlin for five years. Her first novel, Book of Clouds, published in 2009, won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France. She lives in London.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Asunder
• Author: Chloe Aridjis
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Random House, 2013
• ISBN: 1448129699, 9781448129690
• Length: 208 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary; Fiction / World Literature / Mexico