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In Rochester, New York, a seventy-five-year-old artist, Austin Fraser, is creating a new series of paintings recalling the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him -- his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a First World War nurse, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and Sara, a waitress from the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet, Ontario, who became Austin's model and mistress. Spanning more than seven decades, from the turn of the century to the mid-seventies, The Underpainter -- in range, in the sheer power of its prose, and in its brilliant depiction of landscape and the geography of imagination -- is Jane Urquhart's most accomplished novel to date, with one of the most powerful climaxes in contemporary fiction.

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