Marie’s job as a museum guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belie their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the warder who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery’s masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.

After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn apart.

from Amazon.co.uk

Chloe Aridjis (1971- ) was born in New York City and grew up in Mexico City, daughter of the poet Homero Aridjis. She studied comparative literature at Harvard, and had a doctoral degree in magic and poetry in nineteenth-century France from Oxford. Her first novel Book of Clouds, published in 2009, won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France. It is acclaimed as "a stunningly accurate portrait of Berlin, as well as a thoughtful portrayal of a young Mexican Jew drifting through her life abroad" (The New York Times). Asunder is her second novel, which is mainly based in London, the city where Aridjis is now settled in.