A painter is commissioned to make a portrait of an enigmatic woman, but the act of looking soon becomes less straightforward than it first appears.

As artist and sitter circle one another, the portrait becomes a charged space of projection, desire, memory and concealment: what can be seen, what must be invented, and what remains stubbornly withheld. Miller’s novel is a finely controlled study of artistic attention. The work asks whether intimacy can ever escape distortion, especially when one person is trying to turn another into an image. Elegant, restrained and psychologically alert, it sits beautifully within Miller’s larger body of work: fiction concerned with art, longing, exile and the private histories people carry beneath ordinary surfaces.

First edition Viking, 1995. Paperback. Signed by the author. Good condition.