Muse
Published on 7. August 2008
Book
Hardback
352 pages
978-1-84724-480-2 (ISBN)
Description
When Naomi Price is handed a note at her Paris hotel one night, she is flattered but doesn't pay it much attention. She is far too caught up with her glamourous new friends and the world of images they work in. But when she returns to London, the strange notes keep coming. Soon she is questioning her dreams and desires in a way she can't quite put her finger on. And before long she takes a blind jump out of her conventional existence. Why would anyone want to be someone else's muse?
Reviews / Votes
dizzying and risk-taking - Daily Telegraph. She has a unique voice: her remarkable gift of observation and feeling rendered in prose which is at once dream-like and yet minutely precise. I think MUSE heralds an enormous talent - Cressida Connolly ...ambitious and unusual novel very modern, very cool and reminiscent of Tana Janowitz and Jay Mcinerney. Weirdly addictive, in a good way - Red Magazine ... she's written one of the coolest, most unusual novels I've ever read, effortlessly taking the reader inside the troubled psyche of her antiheroine. Set against the backdrop of the world of fashion and beauty magazines and their attendant fetishism of glamour, Muse tracks a young stylist, Naomi, on her first shoot in the steamy heat of Paris in August. The Devil Wears Prada it is not. Muse is a dark, sexy, literary novel, confidently written and deeply disturbing - The Scotsman Brilliantly depicts the precarious fine line between real artistic creativity and self-delusory pretension. Naomi's voice is intelligent, playful and ironic, ultimately tragic. I couldn't put this down - New Books Magazine. Finely crafted verbal pyrotechnics with a disturbingly dark subject matter - Scotland on Sunday.More details
Person
Susan Irvine was born in Scotland and brought up abroad. She is a journalist who has written for Vogue, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Financial Times. Muse is her first novel; Corpus, a collection of short stories, is also published by Quercus.