This hugely entertaining and engaging novel begins with the protagonist, artist Ellie Robertson, winning a major prize for one of her paintings and trying to come up with her next project to continue her successful trajectory. She decides to embark upon a series of portraits of her ex-partners, and what follows clarifies her own processes of looking, selection and evaluation.
Ellie curates and investigates her own past through the process of portraiture and in turn illuminates her experiences of love and future expectations about what a relationship could be for her. Her search for personal identity and how that has been shaped by the people she has loved is distilled over the course of her investigation.
Beginning with Diana, her luminous art school first love, who is now partnered and pregnant, trying to find her childhood boyfriend Jeremy, negotiating an exploitative academic from her past and finally realising her love for the unavailable Frances, Ellie reveals as much about herself through the portraits as the people she is painting.
With the juxtaposition of the narratives of her friend Rebecca’s engagement and the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, Ellie comes to a new understanding of the process of painting and the role of observation.
Earp also writes vividly about the role of art in developing appreciation of ourselves and the wider world, as Ellie considers her new-found fame, asked to paint a portrait of a dying tycoon by his family with neither love for their father nor appreciation of art.
Earp’s novel vividly creates characters who are in the process of change and re-evaluation at all stages of their lives, trying to work out what is most important and finding their true selves.
