The Artist's Widow is a novel written by British author Shena Mackay

Shena Mackay

Shena Mackay FRSL , is a Scottish novelist born in Edinburgh. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for The Orchard on Fire.-Biography:...

 and first published in 1998 by Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...

. It is mentioned twice in the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide (2003) and according to the The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (2003) this 'satire on modern artistic values, is one of her most astringent novels'.. Paul Baumann's review in The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

opened with 'this is a vicious little book, and thus all the more enjoyable'.

Plot introduction

Set in the contemporary art scene in London it is centred around Lyris, the widow of John Crane and begins at a viewing of her late husbands work; also present are her friend Clovis Ingram - a bookstore owner, a beautiful young television film-maker called Zoe, and Lyris' great nephew Nathan Pursey an up and coming performance artist. The book concerns their complex interelationships in the wake of John Crane's death...

External links

• Flower Power (review from New York Times)
• Chapter 1 (online)