Spring 2008. The art world is awash with money, and Piers Guest is getting his share. Celebrated art mogul, critic, impresario and 'adviser' with a client list ranging from the wealthiest of individual collectors to an international merchant bank, he is a bona fide member of the glitterati. Graced with his own beauty, he gallivants through London's galleries, cafes and hotels, playground for multi-millionaire artists, financiers and infidelity, while still enjoying a Chelsea mansion with his wife and daughter. Until a mysterious meeting about a newly discovered masterpiece begins a hunt that will lead him onto an altogether different terrain...

1933. Under the shadow of the newly elected Nazi party, Helga and Ernst Mann bring a disabled child into the world. While her husband Ernst, a folklorist, drifts near the baleful influence of the Third Reich, Helga will stop at nothing to keep her child safe.

1890. Vincent Van Gogh is living out his last few weeks in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise. Tormented by illness and regret, his only companions are the melancholy Dr Gachet, the ghosts of his own past, and the group of disturbed but engaging patients being treated by Gachet. Taking up his brush, he paints the picture that will draw so many disparate lives together.

From the troubled genius of Vincent Van Gogh to the wartime birch forests of Ukraine, from the scintillating labyrinths of contemporary art and commerce to a mother's desperate journey across Germany into the teeth of the Red Army, Jonathan Tulloch's novel examines madness and creativity, love and destruction, the painting of a picture and the lust to own.