Rose Boyt Knihy

Sometimes there is just not enough love to go round...Maureen's family is a blessing and a curse. Her mother did her best but everyone is still fighting for survival at the expense of their loved ones.Susan thinks her aunt is her sister. Nobody has seen Sandra's Kelly since Alan stashed a pound weight of drugs in his mum's kitchen. Mum wins the lottery but little Billy comes first, no question. He needs help. It is too late now for the old man. Maureen is afraid he will die before she has finished hating him.With compassion and dark humour, this remarkable novel celebrates life and death in the London borough of Hackney and everything in between.

'I can't think of an art book with an opening page like it. Lines land like detonation . . . The writing is hypnotic and propulsive . . . It's so powerful, so horrible, the set-up compelling.' - The Sunday Times Cleaning the studio made me feel special, downtrodden and loved for all the wrong reasons. The floor was marked with a brush and thinned paint to establish the position of any furniture that was in use, the painted hieroglyphics of no particular colour but indelible so that everything could be repositioned and put back between sittings, all the functional lines alive and purposeful like his handwriting. In Naked Portrait Rose Boyt explores her complicated relationship with her beloved father, Lucian Freud, through her diary and other accounts of sitting for him, naked or otherwise. Enthralled by his genius, it was only after his death that she began to question the version of events she had come to accept. The shock of the truth is profound but what emerges is her love and compassion not just for herself as a vulnerable young woman, but for the man himself, who is shown in all his brilliant complexity.