The Sensualist: A Mystery

Description

On a night train from Munich to Vienna, Helen Martin discovers, quite literally, that she is losing her senses. Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste - all are disappearing, and her own body parts are taking on unfamiliar characteristics. The author of The Tattooed Map has created a mystery cum love story with a brain that weaves together the unseemly history of anatomical art with a gruesome modern-day murder. A visual and literary sortie into the realm of the body, The Sensualist is a potent mystery about the limitations of looking and the boundless power of seeing. Helen's search takes her through the capitals of Europe and from the sixteenth century to the Second World War to last winter. But her real journey lies within, as each of her five senses comes alive with catastrophic acuity. A deftly woven conundrum of art forgery, thievery, and connoisseurship, The Sensualist is also the chronicle of a ruinous love affair and the history of a lost body.

Barbara Hodgson is a Vancouver writer, book designer, and photographer. Her first book was the much-acclaimed illustrated novel The Tattooed Map, set in Morocco and published by Chronicle Books. She collaborated with Karen Elizabeth Gordon and Nick Bantock on Paris out of Hand (also from Chronicle Books), a fictional guidebook to Paris, and has recently complied a bizarre anthology called The Rat: A Perverse Miscellany (Ten Speed Press).