Alex Hyde and Rhiannon Lucy Coslett in conversation - Islington

Join us with Alex Hyde and Rhiannon Lucy Coslett to discuss their latest novels: EXHIBITION - A charged novel that delves into the intense friendship between an artist and her muse in the London art scene of the 1990s - and FEMALE NUDE - A gorgeous, sultry novel about the push and pull of desire, and an artist living in a world that asks too much of a woman.
EXHIBITION
Amid the heady rebellion of London's Young British Artists, Rabble Stone, a photographer, meets the artist, a painter, after renting a room in her Brixton home. Soon Rabble is in thrall to this new world: to the run-down glamour of the Victorian house; to the exhilarating and debauched gallery openings, and to those in the artist's orbit, beautiful and lost. Above all, she is drawn to her new friend's work; raw, unfiltered self-portraits of startling intimacy, which Rabble captures in her uncompromising photographs. But as Rabble's longing tips into obsession, her pursuit of the artist - her fame, her wealth, her life - threatens to consume her.Travelling from London to Algiers, to Berlin and New York, Exhibition is a story of love, ego and destruction, and the dark relationship between authenticity and celebrity, artist and muse.

FEMALE NUDE

Sophie, a painter, is holidaying with friends in a stunning villa in Greece - her best friend Helena is shortly to be married, and this is the last time she and her friends will be together as single women. But life has treated them so differently since their university days, that Sophie is questioning everything about their friendship. Meanwhile her partner, Greg, is desperate for them to try for a baby, but she wants to devote herself to her art - and there are other, deeper forces, pulling the two of them in opposite directions.In the course of the holiday, Sophie paints a nude portrait of her friend Alessia, and becomes involved in an intense affair with Ky, who lives and works on the island. Both the painting, and the affair, will challenge everything Sophie thinks she knows, about art, about motherhood, about sex - and about how and with whom she wants to spend the rest of her life.

Alex Hyde is an Associate Professor at University College London. Her first novel Violets, a fictional reimagining of her father's story, was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and shortlisted for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize. She lives with her family in South London.

Rhiannon Lucy Coslett is the author of the memoir The Year of the Cat, a previous novel The Tyranny of Lost Things, and a collection of her Guardian columns, The Republic of Parenthood. She also reviews fiction for the Guardian and her journalism has appeared in Vogue, the Observer Magazine, i newspaper, TIME, the New Statesman, Stylist, Elle, and many more. Raised in Wales, she lives in north London with her husband, son, and cat, Mackerel.

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