The Horse's Arse

Patrick Phelan is an ageing artist who has never made it big but who somehow manages to live on air in a North London suburb. When not running art classes for amateurs, Patrick wrestles in the shed at the bottom of his garden with his life's work: a series of visionary canvases of The Seven Seals. When his wheeler-dealer son Marty turns up with a commission from a rich client for some copies of paintings by modern masters, Phelan reluctantly agrees; it means money for his ex-wife Moira. However the deal with Marty is, typically, not what it seems. What follows is a complex chain of events involving fakery, fraud, kidnapping, murder, the Russian Mafia and a cast of dubious art world characters. A contemporary spin on Joyce Cary's classic satire The Horse's Mouth, The Horse's Arse by Laura Gascoigne is a crime thriller-cum-comic-fable that poses the serious question: where does art go from here?

Laura Gascoigne has worked as an art journalist for over twenty years, editing Artists & Illustrators (1994-1999) before going freelance. Born in Cairo in 1950, the daughter of a bookseller and an Italian teacher, she grew up in Brussels and Cambridge before studying Classics at Oxford University. Her sister is the writer Marina Warner. Surrounded as a child by the paintings her father collected, Laura has always had a passion for art and when not writing about it, she paints.