The Improbability of Love

A smart, sweeping novel--at once satirical and moving--about love, a famous lost painting, and a dark secret from the past, set in the London art world.

Annie McDee, thirty-one and recovering from the end of a long-term relationship, is chef for two sinister art dealers. She's just spent her meager savings on a dusty junk-shop painting for her new, unsuitable, boyfriend. But when he doesn't show up for his birthday dinner, it becomes hers. And amazingly, the painting speaks--though only we hear "him." Shrewd, spoiled, charming, world weary, and cynical, he comments, from his unique perspective, on Annie and the modern world, but he also recounts tales of his previous owners: Louis XV, Voltaire, and Catherine the Great, among them. Once it becomes known that Annie has the painting--whose provenance involves the Nazis--she finds herself at the center of a frantic, and sometimes fiendish, scramble among dealers, collectors, and other highly interested parties, for its ownership. It's a dazzlingly irreverent and entertaining many-layered tale of a devious world where, however improbably, love will triumph.

HANNAH ROTHSCHILD is the author of The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild. She is also a film director whose documentaries have appeared at such festivals as Telluride and Tribeca. Her filmThe Jazz Baroness, about her great-aunt "Nica" Rothschild and Thelonious Monk, was broadcast by BBC and HBO in 2009. She has written for BritishVanity Fair, Vogue, The Independent, and The Spectator. She is vice president of the Hay Literary Festival in Wales, a Trustee of the Tate, and in 2015 became the first woman to chair the National Gallery in London.