A novel about love and creation that is ruthless in its intimacy.

The Orange Grove has been translated into more than 20 languages and has sold over 110,000 copies en French, becoming a modern classic. The register and the subject is different here, but doesn’t lack in strength.

Freely inspired by the life of the painter Francis Bacon, A Last Painting of Love chronicles an artistic quest that is uncompromising, visceral, even dangerous. In a Europe that has lived through two wars, there emerges the radical vision of an artist whose entire body of work, obsessed, indeed, with the body, resonates like a cry. Addressing the lover who served him as a model – this “amateur little thief” who, in the middle of the night, has invaded his studio – the narrator retraces the highs and lows of their tumultuous relationship. With this novel, recalling the eroticism of Bataille or Leiris, Larry Tremblay furthers his project of laying bare the human soul.

You had not to paint the surface of things, but what it concealed. Not to paint space, but time. Not to paint your body, but its death.