The first book to focus on Dame Paula Rego’s little-known monumental triptych, Crivelli’s Garden, featuring an original short story by novelist Chloe Aridjis, new photography, and an art historical essay   Dame Paula Rego RA (1935–2022) was a British-Portuguese artist whose large-scale figurative paintings explored human relationships and the experience of women through compelling, often subversive compositions. Inspired by the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s altarpiece La Madonna della Rondine (after 1490), Rego produced Crivelli’s Garden in 1990−91 while she was artist in residence at the National Gallery. This monumental triptych reimagined the site of Crivelli’s panel as a radical space populated by female figures from myth, folklore, and the Bible, alongside animals drawn from Aesop’s fables and other classical texts. Literature was a major influence on Rego’s practice throughout her career: this publication in turn celebrates the far-reaching influence of Rego’s paintings with an original short story by Mexican novelist Chloe Aridjis, inspired by Rego’s triptych. Illustrated with previously unpublished preparatory drawings and newly photographed details of the painting, the book also features an art historical essay on the work.   Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University Press   Exhibition Schedule:   The National Gallery, London  (July 20–October 29, 2023)

Book of Clouds is a haunting, masterfully wrought debut novel about a young woman adrift in Berlin, where a string of fateful encounters leads to romance, violence, and revelation. Having escaped her overbearing family a continent away, Tatiana settles in Berlin and cultivates solitude while distancing herself from the city's past. Yet the phantoms of Berlin--seeping in through the floorboards of her apartment, lingering in the abandoned subterranea--are more alive to her than the people she passes on her daily walks. When she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive historian Doktor Weiss, her life in Berlin becomes more complex--and more perilous. Through Weiss, she meets Jonas, a meteorologist who, as a child in the GDR, took solace in the sky's constant shape-shifting, an antidote to his grim and unyielding reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begin to change, culminating in an act of violence that will leave none of them untouched. Unfolding with the strange, charged logic of a dream, Book of Clouds is a profound portrait of a city forever in flux, and of the myths we cling to in order to give shape to our lives. From a crowded U-Bahn where Hitler appears dressed as an old woman, to an underground Gestapo bowling alley whose walls bear score marks from games long settled, Chloe Aridjis guides us through Berlin with wit and compassion, blurring the lines between real and imagined, and showing why cities, like people, cannot outrun their pasts.

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award 2019

'A mesmerizing, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness... For my money, Chloe Aridjis is one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today' Garth Greenwell

One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, 17-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with the reckless, impulsive Tomás, a boy she barely knows. Their quest: to track down a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have recently escaped a touring circus.

Together they head for Zipolite, the ‘Beach of the Dead’, a community peopled by hippies, nudists, beach combers and eccentric storytellers, and Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will ‘promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery’. But as Luisa wanders the shoreline, she begins to discover that a quest is more easily envisioned than accomplished.

'Destined to be a classic: a richly imaginative, reflective and entracing novel' Xiaolu Guo

Marie's job as a guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.

After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open.

"Asunder" is a rich, resonant novel of beguiling depths and beautiful strangeness, exploring the delicate balance between creation and destruction, control and surrender.

Marie's job as a museum guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belie their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the warder who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War. After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn apart.

Simon Moretti is known for his enigmatic exhibition works, presenting displays that engage with questions of agency, temporality, automatism, desire and masculinity. Incorporating appropriated images and archives as well as curatorial and publishing projects, often made in collaboration with other artists, his work addresses the role of 'curating as practice'. Presented as a non-chronological visual essay, this publication surveys 10 years of collage works by Moretti. It includes text contributions from writer Craig Burnett, curator and art historian Yuval Etgar, novelists Deborah Levy and Chloe Aridjis, and a conversation with Andrew Durbin, editor-in-chief of frieze magazine.