The Eleven Associates of Alma-Marceau (HC) (2020)

Against a backdrop of late capitalism, globalization, media, and surveillance, The Eleven Associates of Alma-Marceau not only asks questions about how people's images, words, and lives are given a platform, used, and manipulated in the digital era, but also invites readers to question the very nature of what they perceive. Within this modern-day story about painting, visual communication, and how creative ideas are responded to by society, Leonardo, of course, is still ahead of the game, more than five hundred years after his death...

The Eleven Associates of Alma-Marceau is an oddly intoxicating, gently mind-blowing novel that follows a summer in the life of Adam, a promising young British painter undertaking an internship at a contemporary art museum in Paris. A strange revelation in front of Leonardo's Mona Lisa during an evening out with an unusual group of young people who have taken Adam under their wing proves not only to be the cause of intense debate, but also to be a turning point in a series of interconnected events in which Adam finds himself caught up in much more than his own coming-of-age.