Nearly twenty years ago, Angela Carole Brown was properly slapped and mesmerized by a quote of Virginia Woolf's: "Who can pen when he is bored? The minds of leisure only can be trite." What she had no notion of, at the time, was how pivotal that idea would end up being in the writing of her new novel THE ASSASSINATION OF GABRIEL CHAMPION. Ms. Brown has spent the greater part of her life being an artist (a musician by trade), and asking the questions: What compels us? What do we do it for? And to what lengths are we willing to go to fuel it? This kernel became the very seed of her book, a modernist tale set in Los Angeles and Paris at the end of the last century. Exploring themes of violence and redemption, set in the world of art and artists, THE ASSASSINATION OF GABRIEL CHAMPION ultimately asks its own question: What can we forgive?
Writer NONA CHILDE is in love with artists. They are the very embodiment of all her romantic notions. So when she meets DANIEL CROSS, a gifted painter who is teetering on the brink of Heathcliffian torment (an intoxicating contrivance in Nona's mind), she is presented with the opportunity to finally complete the arc of a long-coveted torch song life. What she isn't prepared for is a real playing out of the scourge of an artist's soul; one far darker than any she could conjure with a pen.
The relationship that ensues between the brooding Englishman artist and the passionate young American authoress thrusts them headlong into a kaleidoscope of violent mood and memory, of euphoric, self-indulgent, torrential love. They begin to tear apart as irascibly as they are brought together, but not before involving one ARTHUR HUGHES DUFRESNE, a local poet with a devastating past who succeeds in complicating the tangle, in this meditation on the complex nature of love and loss.