The landscape of love - Sally Beauman

"If I didn't spy, I'd be in the dark eternally.
I live in a maze of unknowing — Maisie's maze — and I hate it.
I need to be informed."

The summer of 1967, in the heart of rural Suffolk: thirteen-year-old Maisie is at her decaying family home, once a medieval abbey. Lucas, an artist and friend, is painting a portrait of Maisie and her elder sisters — arrogant, beautiful Julia and bookish Finn. In turn, Maisie embarks on a portrait of her own: she tells the story of her sisters and their lovers, of her village friend, Daniel Nunn. She describes a lost England and a last summer — golden months in which lives will irrevocably, and terribly, change.

Twenty-three years later, it's 1991 in a wintry London. Lucas's now-famous portrait of the three Mortland sisters features in a retrospective of his work. Daniel, down on his luck, obsessed by the sisters and determined to understand what happened that last summer at the Abbey, pursues answers to the past.

The Landscape of Love explores the nature of perception, the misdemeanours of love, the dangers of art and the devilry of language. It examines stories, but is in itself a story that grips from the first page. Beguiling, complex, hauntingly sad and often wonderfully funny, it is a dazzling tour de force.