In Joanna Scott's novel, the Austrian artist Egon Schiele comes to prismatic life in a narrative that defies convention, history, and personality. A self-professed genius and student of Gustav Klimt, Scott's Schiele repeatedly challenges the boundaries of early twentieth-century Europe. Thrown in jail on charges of immorality, Schiele's Mephistophelean reputation only grows in stature. It is at the age of only twenty-eight, in 1918 and at the height of his fame and influence, that the artist dies in the Great Flu Pandemic. Told from a crosscurrent of voices, viewpoints, and times, this novel won Scott a nomination for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award.