![]() ![]() For a gloomy, exiled Russian oligarch, an avaricious sheikha, a desperate auctioneer, and an unscrupulous dealer, among others, the painting embodies their greatest hopes and fears. Soon Annie finds herself pursued by interested parties who would do anything to possess her picture. But who painted this masterpiece is not clear at first. The painting becomes hers, and as it turns out, Annie has stumbled across a lost masterpiece by one of the most important French painters of the eighteenth century. After spending her meager savings on the picture, Annie prepares an elaborate birthday dinner for two, only to be stood up. Hidden behind a rubber plant on top of a file cabinet, a grimy painting catches her eye. Recovering from the end of a long-term relationship, she is searching in a neglected secondhand shop for a birthday present for her unsuitable new lover. In The Improbability of Love we meet Annie McDee, thirty-one, who is working as a chef for two rather sinister art dealers. Its sweeping narrative and cast of wildly colorful characters takes you behind the scenes of a London auction house, into the secret operations of a powerful art dealer, to a flamboyant eighteenth-century-style dinner party, and into a modest living room in Berlin, among many other unexpected settings. ![]() Wickedly funny, this totally engaging, richly observed first novel by Hannah Rothschild is a tour de force. ![]()
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