The Booker prize-winning novelist returns with his finest novel to date -- a profound meditation on the nature of death and what we live for. Involuntary self-murder is a symptom of what Matthew Maddox, emeritus professor of the Drayburgh School of Fine Art, considers to be a cultural as well as a social malaise -- his summing-up of the century he has lived through. His children gone, his wife re-married, his attempt at suicide having failed, he is drawn remorselessly through a process of rehabilitation, a search for “purpose”. Even a man divided from himself is not alone. Struggling for his future are Simone, his lover and former analyst; his revered mentor, Daniel Viklund; his brother Paul and reliable sister Sarah. But against him stands his past; and above all, Eric Taylor, once his brightest student and now a convicted murderer. From the Hardcover edition.