The Biographer

(Paperback)

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Greer Gordon lives in Italy with Mischa Svoboda, a driven Czech-born painter with a booming international reputation. She and Mischa met when his debut show at the small Melbourne art gallery where Greer then worked created a sensation. Their explosive love affair caused Greer to abandon her husband, job and autocratic boss Verity, sever all contact with home and embark on a nomadic life with Mischa. Twenty-five years later, Tony, a young American art critic, has been researching a biography of Mischa and arrives in their small hilltop community. Greer is consumed by anxiety, fearing the biographer may have unearthed something that happened as a consequence of her meeting Mischa, a buried secret she had intended to write out of her life story. Greer and Tony play out a gripping cat-and-mouse game in which she tries to glean who he has spoken to and what, if anything, he knows, while he lets drop, with calculated casualness, graded snippets of information designed to keep her guessing. As her hand is forced, Greer embarks on a tense journey of her own. Through Tony's artful interrogations and her own diary, she is compelled to put her youthful self on trial. In the process she makes a life-changing discovery.

Reviews

"A clear light on the ruthless habits of biography. Marvelous." --Drusilla Modjeska, author, "The Orchard"
"Duigan's novel is a gripping study of the duel between the woman with a secret and the biographer who senses her fear. Beautifully paced, and even more sinister for its decorous setting, "The Biographer" offers the elements of a detective story and a debate on biography's methods and ethics in a sympathetically drawn human situation." --"Age"
"The backgrounds have a physical richness, and the portrayal of artistic life and conflicts is convincingly achieved." --Christopher Koch, author, " The Year of Living Dangerously"

Author Bio

Virginia Duigan wrote the screenplay of the 1998 movie The Leading Man, starring Jon Bon Jovi, Thandie Newton and Barry Humphries. Before becoming a novelist, Duigan worked as a journalist, broadcaster, editor and TV scriptwriter. She was a regular feature writer on The National Times, and contributed documentaries to ABC radio. She was a freelance contributor to The Bulletin, The Age, The Australian, The Financial Review, Cinema Papers, and in London to the The Observer and The Times. She was Literary Editor of The National Times, and a theatre, book, film and restaurant reviewer. She has written three novels; The Precipice, Days Like These and The Biographer.