The Lemon Painters

The English in Paris take on Édouard Manet at his own game; a family holiday sets in motion events that will last many years; an abandoned author finally seeks revenge...

In this collection of sly, witty, unsettling stories, the novelist and artist Charlotte Cory shows her skill at creating lives in a few vivid strokes, as well as her unrivalled eye for the manias and delusions that bubble away under even the most apparently comfortable of façades.

Charlotte Cory is the author of 5 novels, 3 of which were published by Faber and Faber and numerous original BBC radio drama series, short stories and plays. She is also London based artist best known for her VISITORIANA - a complete, fantastical, "wholly believable" alternative 19th Century, a post-Darwinian intriguing universe of reworked, recycled, collaged and montaged Victorian "carte de visite" photography. Her artworks are in the Royal Collection at Windsor, and have been sold at art fairs all round the world, and exhibited in galleries in Britain, France and Germany, the USA and including the Royal Academy of Art Summer Exhibitions in London. She divides her time between Greenwich, London on the River Thames, where she has a big 1863 Columbian press with an eagle on top, and Sancerre on the River Loire in France, where she works on a small cast iron 1832 Albion press.

Praise for Charlotte Cory: 

“One of the pleasures of reading Charlotte Cory…. is the sense of exuberant invention [...] A natural storyteller” The Guardian

“Cory has a keen satirical eye and tells her story lucidly” The Telegraph

“[...] in quite another league of invention” Financial Times

“Cory takes considerable delight in human waywardness [...] Cory is a writer whose depths are best manifested in comedy, and who is at her funniest when what she mocks is at its most bleak”

"Charlotte Cory’s intellectual adventurousness and experimental feel for genre are admirable.”

“Charlotte Cory breeds from a rare crossing of empathy, absurdity and the macabre”  Times Literary Supplement

“exuberant, witty, bizarre" “sophisticated, sure-footed and entertaining” The Observer

“A writer to watch. [...] Cory is an exhuberant, inventive storyteller” The Independent

“strange, almost exuberant nihilism [...] every story has imagination, wit and compassion” The Sunday Times