A hopeless art critic sets out to write the biography that will make his name.

Sebastian Zöllner, an underachieving art critic, has pinned his hopes of advancement on writing the biography of the artist Manuel Kaminski, a forgotten former pupil of Matisse, now an ailing recluse. Inept, charmless, and with scant knowledge of art history, Zöllner is hardly the man to rediscover a lost genius of 20th-century painting. But he has made one crucial discovery about his subject: that Kaminski's long-lost love, Therese, is still living, contrary to what the artist himself has been led to believe. A wryly humorous meditation on art, memory, and identity.

'Witty, shrewd and smartly translated ... Delightful'