Following the discovery of an anonymous libretto, composer Abner Blossom comes out of retirement to write an opera based on the life of the infamous novelist-turned-photographer Cyril Vane. But those who knew Vane and his Russian-born wife, the silent screen star Madame Olga Petrovna, are prepared to go to any lengths to suppress the truth about them. Vane's dark secret follows him to the grave, but his jealous and vengeful widow and her faded cronies employ all the means at their disposal to prevent the opening of Blossom's opera, an explosive grand finale to his career.

This dazzling new novel by one of America's finest contemporary writers is peopled by the gothic charaters readers of James Purdy have come to anticipate and relish, from Val Sturgis, Kentucky boy made good and now Blossom's protege, to Francis X. Beauregard, ageing star of the silver screen now living surrounded by street-wise hustlers in his Brooklyn mansion. Here Purdy is at his most incisive, charting America's twentieth-century decline.

"Highly successful, suspended from the high ceiling of Purdy's prime, like a dazzling chandelier. Purdy has certainly never been funnier, his writing never more self-assured." Times Literary Supplement

"A well-established maverick who can still find room in his fiction for the truly bizarre and unpredictable. There is certainly fun to be had in this convoluted story with prose of chrystalline beauty." London Review of Books