The Last Portrait of a Drowned Girl
A Novel

About this book:

On a windswept Cornish beach in 1923, painter Julian Devaux hauls a drowned woman from the surf—her silk gown stained with the exact ochre pigment he'd been grinding days before, her wrists marked with printer's ink, a silver key bearing a cryptic monogram sewn into her collar. She is no local. She smells of linseed oil and turpentine. And Julian is certain he's seen her hand before—in the margins of a forgotten sketchbook, in the ghost of a half-erased portrait, in the three-year silence since his most talented rival vanished from the St. Ives art colony.

As the tide erases evidence and the village constable prepares a pauper's burial, Julian realizes the dead woman carries secrets that reach from the cliffs of Penlee Point to the galleries of London. Her identity is a painting he cannot name, rendered in layers someone desperate to keep hidden. To uncover it, he must descend into the competitive, obsessive world of 1920s British modernism—where muses are borrowed, masterpieces are forged, and the line between creation and destruction is drawn in charcoal and seafoam.

Atmospheric and intellectually razor-sharp, *The Last Portrait of a Drowned Girl* is a literary mystery that asks what we leave behind on the canvas—and what we bury beneath the glaze. For readers of *The Miniaturist* and *The Goldfinch*, this is a novel about the price of artistic truth, and the dangerous intimacy of really seeing another soul.