The working-class painter Terry Godden was on the brink of his first success. After a violent crisis, he finds himself outcast. Nearing sixty and with modest means, he has retreated to a small island.
The island seems to be a closed, cold place. As the seasons turn, Terry comes to see that he is one of many people who have sought refuge here. These independent outsiders, all with their own considerable struggles, have made a precarious home.
The island is owned by the businessman and art collector Alex Kaplan. His decision to enforce a rent increase as he seeks to improve his property looks set to destroy a community that cannot afford to lose the little they have left. As an artist, Terry believes making the invisible struggles of the island visible to the world will help – but will his interference save anybody other than himself?
Set among the marginalized and overlooked, The Painter's Friend is a book about the human cost of gentrification. It also explores the role of art in protest, and asks who gets to be an artist and what they owe in return. Written with visual lyricism and driven clarity, Cunnell's urgent novel casts an unflinching eye on the injustice of our age. Howard Cunnell's acclaimed memoir Fathers and Sons (Picador, 2017) was read on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week, and described as 'unique, and uniquely beautiful' (Financial Times); it explores his experiences as a fatherless man raising a transgender son. His novel The Sea on Fire (Picador, 2012), 'maps new noir territory in an incandescent underwater world' (Guardian), and draws from Cunnell's life as a scuba instructor and dive guide. He is the contributing editor of Jack Kerouac's On the Road – The Original Scroll (Viking, 2007), which the New York Times called 'the living version for our time.' Howard Cunnell lives in Sussex. Thrilling and timely, this new novel from a lauded writer tackles questions of class, inequality, resistance and art.
