From the days of their privileged, eccentric English childhood, Jack Rathbone has always enjoyed the adoration of his sister Gin. When both attend St. Martin's School of Art in London, it is a painful wrench for Gin to watch him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a flamboyant, not entirely clean nor sober artist from Glasgow. Jack and Vera run off to New York and, from a bruised and bereft distance, sister Gin follows the couple's progress to Port Mungo, a seedy river town in the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Honduras. There, Jack single-mindedly devotes himself to his art, while Vera succumbs to infidelity and a chronic restlessness, which even the birth of two daughters cannot subdue.Patrick McGrath tracks these individuals across decades and continents: the latter-day Gauguin figure Jack, his buccaneering mate Vera and their two girls, Peg and Anna, cast adrift in their parents' chaos - as observed by Gin, their far from detached chronicler. It is ultimately a world of dark tropical impulses and Manhattan art-market forces, where a mysterious death is swathed in tight complicit secrecy, and the imperatives of narcissism and art hold human beings in outlandish thrall. Read Less