Annie will have her apartment ransacked and be pursued by dealers, buyers and an auctioneer in an attempt to get back the painting. The painting becomes hers, and as it turns out, Annie has stumbled across a lost masterpiece by one of the most important French painters of the eighteenth. The story unfolds through this voice and many others-unexpected, entertaining, and strangely authentic. Shrewd, spoiled, charming, world weary and cynical, he comments perceptively on Annie, and the modern world and tells tales about his previous owners: Louis XV, Voltaire, Catherine the Great among others. Readers know the painting’s creator and name from the prologue, which opens on the day of The Improbability of Love’s highly publicized auction. The painting now hers, talks, but only to us. Following her biography of a jazz-loving great aunt (The Baroness, 2013), Rothschild shifts gears to imagine art-world shenanigans prompted by a long-lost Watteau painting in her first novel. Annie has spent her meagre savings on a dusty painting from a junk shop to give to her new, unsuitable, boyfriend who never shows up for his birthday dinner.

'Annie McMorrow, 31 and not recovered from the end of her long-term relationship, is an assistant to film producer Carlo Spinetti and then to his chilling wife Rebecca Winkleman Spinetti whose father started Winkleman Fine Art in Curzon St. Soon she finds herself drawn unwillingly into the tumultuous London art world, populated by exiled Russian oligarchs, avaricious Sheikhas, desperate auctioneers and unscrupulous dealers, all scheming to get their hands on her painting - a lost eighteenth-century masterpiece called The Improbability of Love. Trying to rebound following her break-up, Annie has entered into a relationship with a most unsuitable man who she ends up buying a dusty painting from a junk shop for.

The improbability of love painting