The God of Spring: A Novel

When the French painter Théodore Géricault died in 1824 at the age of thirty-three, he was mourned as one of the most promising artists of his generation. He was also one of the most controversial, endowed with a character marked by Byronic paradoxes. The cult of Géricault's personality cast him as "genius, athlete, martyr, and romantic ghoul." Indeed, it was the stinging aftermath of an illicit affair with his beautiful young aunt that propelled Géricault into the artistic obsession that would yield his masterwork, The Raft of the Medusa.

The God of Spring opens in Paris in 1818, as the upheavals of the French Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration come to fruition in the aftermath of a naval disaster caused by criminal negligence and tinged with political scandal. Mesmerized by the tales of betrayal, madness, murder, and cannibalism aboard the life raft of the scuttled French frigate Medusa, Géricault takes as his muses two of its survivors. His canvas pits man against nature, its dominant image a doomed sailor futilely raising his hand toward the clouds and salvation.

Arabella Edge read English literature at the University of Bristol in the UK and moved to Australia in 1992. With her husband, Nick Gaze, she now divides her time between Sydney and Bicheno, on Tasmania's east coast. Her first novel, The Company, won the Best First Book in the 2001 Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the South East Asia and South Pacific Region and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.