The Woman in the Picture

Description

This is it. Too late to change my mind. The engine's flexing its muscles, giving a horsy snort. Even if I ran, I couldn't make it back now . Opening with a desperate pilgrimage to the dying Weimar Republic in 1927, The Woman in the Picture tells the story of English film-maker Henry Whitaker during the inter-war years. On his return to Britain, Henry begins his career - first as assistant to the legendary director Arthur Maxted, and then as one of the country's foremost documentary-makers. But all the while he yearns to create a feature film of his own a work of art that will give his life meaning. Interwoven with Henry's narrative is the present-day quest of his daughter, Miranda, to understand what happened to her mother, a refugee Henry met and married in Germany at the end of the war. Did Henry - as his daughter has always supposed - drive Romana to suicide? Or do Miranda's half-repressed childhood memories hint at an altogether more complex and extraordinary truth? With great narrative skill and his rare gift for language, James Wilson brilliantly draws these two strands together, in a rich and impassioned novel about love, war, art, consequence and guilt.

James Wilson was born in Cambridge in 1948 and educated at Oxford University, where he read History. He has written plays, TV documentaries (including the award-winning Savagery and the American Indian for the BBC) and a critically acclaimed history of Native Americans, The Earth Shall Weep, published by Picador and Grove/Atlantic. He is a member of the executive committee of Survival, an international organization campaigning for the rights of indigenous peoples, and acts as their consultant on North American cases. In 1999 he co-wrote a Survival report, Canada's Tibet: the Killing of the Innu, which created a political storm in Canada.He is the author of two novels, The Dark Clue and The Bastard Boy and lives with his wife and family in Bristol.