Poor Angus

“A blackly comic romp” of art, ambition, and sexual politics in the Scottish Isles: “a remarkable novel…written with the lightest of touches” (The Sunday Times, UK).

 

Struggling painter Angus McAllister has returned to the idyllic Hebridean island of his birth in the hope that it will inspire him to create his masterpiece. But soon, his privacy is invaded by Janet, a visitor with relatives on the island, who has decided that an affair with an artist would be the simplest way to incense and recapture her husband, a golf-fanatic devoid of imagination.

So begins an irresistible story of comic lightness and serious implications; a tale told with Jenkins’s characteristic ironic wit that explores the attitudes of men and women to sex and relationships, and which focuses on the psychology of the artist and the justification, if any, for art.

“Poor Angus is a strange, wonderful love story [and] Jenkins a remarkable writer whose gentlest touch induces the greatest of pleasures.”—The Times, UK