It’s winter in London, 1947. When Arthur Bailey, a solitary landscape painter, catches sight of a young woman, Felicity, who is moving into the neighbouring bed-sit, he’s stirred to recall in haunting detail events that have been kept hidden for fifty years.
The Landscape Painter is a double tale of obsession, betrayed trust and irrepressible hope. As a young and brilliant artist, Arthur travelled to South Africa in the late 1890s to pursue his best friend’s sister, the beautiful and enigmatic Carwyn Hamilton. His subsequent revelations about Carwyn were to blight his life and torment him for decades afterwards.
From the gold-crazed streets of early Johannesburg and the epic battlefields of the Anglo-Boer War, to the austerity of post-War Britain, The Landscape Painter is a spectacular historical novel filled with wit and insight, written in Higginson’s characteristically sinuous, lyrical prose.