Alternating between nineteenth-centuryEngland and present-day NY, this is the tale of renowned British painterJ. M. W. Turner and his circle of customers and lovers. It is also the storyplot ofHenry Leiden, a middle-aged family man using a troubled relationship and a dead-endjob, who discovers his life transformed by his finding of Turner’s THE GUTS of the World, a mesmerizing and unsettlingpainting of Helen of Troy that was thought to have been lost forever.

This painting has such damaging about The Center of the World eroticpower that it had been kept hidden for nearly two centuries, and was even said tohave been destroyed-until Henry stumbles upon it within a secret compartment at hissummer home in the Adirondacks. Though he knows it is an object of immensevalue, the very thought of parting with it really is unbearable: Henry is transfixed by itsrevelation of a whole other world, one of transcendent light, joy, andpossibility.

Back in thenineteenth century, Turner struggles to produce The Center of the World,his greatest painting but a painting unlike anything he (or other people) hasever attempted. We fulfill his patron, Lord Egremont, an aristocrat in whosepalatial home Turner talks openly about his art and his beliefs. We also meetElizabeth Spencer, Egremont’s mistress and Turner’s muse, the model for hisHelen. On the other hand, in the present, Henry is definitely relentlessly trailed by anunscrupulous artwork dealer driven to obtain his hands on the painting at anycost. Filled up with sex, beauty, and like (of most kinds), this richly texturednovel explores the intersection between artwork and eroticism.