"Set in Paris in 1818, during the upheavals of the French Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration, Arabella Edge's second novel is inspired by the story of Theodore Gericault and his extraordinary struggle to paint his masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa." "Having won a Gold Medal at the prestigious salon for his painting Charging Chasseur, completed at the tender age of twenty-one, Gericault finds himself, seven years later, distracted and lovesick due to his secret affair with his benefactor-uncle's young wife, Alexandrine, still desperately searching for the subject of his next tableau. Then, at the house of his neighbour, he hears about the French frigate Medusa, shipwrecked off the west African coast." "With one hundred and fifty souls abandoned on an unseaworthy, makeshift raft, and tales of betrayal, madness, murder and cannibalism, this was a catastrophe that horrified the French public - but Gericault is fascinated. When he manages to track down two of the raft's survivors and invites them to his home to discover what really happened during those fifteen days at sea, Gericault knows he has finally found his subject. The question for him is whether he can maintain his sanity while depicting their story."--BOOK JACKET.