The Blue Guitar

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From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, a new novel--at once trenchant, witty, and shattering--about the intricacies of artistic creation and theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselves.Equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme, is a painter of some renown, and a petty thief who does not steal for profit and has never before been caught. But he's pushing fifty, feels like a hundred, and things have not been going so well lately. Having recognized the "man-killing crevasse" that exists between what he sees and any representation he might make of it--any attempt to make what he sees his own--he's stopped painting. And his last purloined possession--aquired the last time he felt the "secret shiver of bliss" in thievery--has been discovered. The fact that it was the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend, has compelled him to...