Alice Knott: A Novel

Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by Refinery29

A hypnotic, wildly inventive novel about art, violence, and endurance

Alice Knott lives alone, a reclusive heiress haunted by memories of her deceased parents and mysterious near-identical brother. Much of her family’s fortune has been spent on a world-class collection of artwork, which she stores in a vault in her lonely, cavernous house. One day, she awakens to find the artwork destroyed, the act of vandalism captured in a viral video that soon triggers a rash of copycat incidents. As more videos follow and the world’s most priceless works of art are destroyed one by one, Alice finds that she has become the chief suspect in an international conspiracy—even as her psyche becomes a shadowed landscape of childhood demons and cognitive disorder.

Unsettling, almost physically immersive, Alice Knott is a virtuoso exploration of the meaning of art and the lasting afterlife of trauma, as well as a deeply humane portrait of a woman whose trials feel both apocalyptic and universal.

Blake Butler is the author of acclaimed novels including 300,000,000, There Is No Year, and Scorch Atlas, as well as the nonfiction Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, Bookforum, BOMB Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.