Zoia's Gold

Stockholm, December 1999. Madame Zoia, artist and Russian-born aristocrat, is dead. She leaves behind a house full of paintings, a collection of private papers, and a legend. Zoia was more than an artist. Her life and her work coalesced into a symbol of Tsarist Russia - its faith and its mystery. Her dramatic escape from the Revolutionary torturers of the Lubyanka, an artistic journey that took in the teachings of Vassily Kandinksy and an unfailing ability to command the devotion of beautiful men: these are the ingredients of a mythology that is about to be translated into cold, hard cash. Zoia's death has suddenly made her work highly collectable; her opulent paintings on gold as enigmatic as their creator. When Marcus Elliot is hired to write a glossy catalogue for a retrospective exhibition, his task proves far from simple. Zoia's private papers hint at an existence of betrayal, sexual predation and despair. Elliot, whose life is also touched by darkness, plunges into Zoia's life and dazzling work. But gold conceals just as much as it illuminates, and Elliot slowly begins to realize that the true significance of her paintings has been deliberately, jealously concealed - by none other than Zoia herself. Drawing faithfully on Madama Zoia's actual correspondence and on accounts of her early life, Zoia's Gold tells the story of a remarkable woman and her bewitching world.


Genre: Literary Fiction