Tiepolo Blue

Evocative and accurate . . . meticulous and atmospheric . . . delicious unease and pervasive threat give this assured first novel great singularity and a kind of gothic edge . . . an electric new novel written by an author skilled in the evocation of vertiginous, heightened emotion -- Michael Donkor * Guardian * This divine debut from art critic and academic James Cahill is the smart, sexy read you need . . . Not only an addictive pageturner, Cahill's book taps into the tensions and suspicions between generations that feels incredibly relevant for our testy times * Evening Standard * Already a compelling psychosexual story about beauty, desire and art, Tiepolo Blue is all the more interesting because it hits notes of such strangeness -- Lucy Scholes, Fiction Books of the Year * Prospect * One of the standout debut novels is James Cahill's Tiepolo Blue, a coming-of-age tale set in London in the 1990s that deftly explores what it is like to suffer a very public fall from grace * Independent * Art, academia and abject self-denial combine in this startlingly impressive, 1990s-set debut . . . A heavily perfumed, sexually tender, psychologically acute novel . . . as full of light and colour as Tiepolo's incandescent skies * Daily Mail * Arresting . . . a masterly attention to (especially visual) detail and an irresistibly propulsive, almost swaggering style . . . Cahill is by no means a polemical author, and the novel is all the better for it. Any authorial commentary is barely detectable above the crowd of vivid characters with which Cahill has populated his novel, for Tiepolo Blue is, at its heart, an astute character study * Literary Review * What starts off as a campus novel soon shades into something weirder and much more mesmerizing . . . The plot is propulsive, though the crafted ambience of unease simultaneously destabilizes the reader at every turn. The prose is fluid and precise but the tone equivocal, bathos merging into pathos, tragedy into farce and back again . . . It's a measure of Cahill's sleight of hand that he manages to inject his plot with such page-turning momentum -- Lucasta Miller * Times Literary Supplement * Tiepolo Blue is about a buttoned-up art historian in Cambridge in 1994 who messes up and gets a job managing a London gallery just as the Young British Artists enter their glory. One of them initiates his unbuttoning which is dizzying and exciting and unsettling, and beautifully told -- Rev Richard Coles, Big Writers on Their Best Reads of 2022 * Daily Mail * A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling . . . wildly enjoyable . . . The combination of arty milieu and sexual stirrings may evoke Alan Hollinghurst, but Iris Murdoch is a more obvious point of comparison . . . Snobbish and incompetent, Don may be difficult to like, but his painful awakening is delicately rendered * Financial Times * An ambitious novel about the wonders of art and the depths of the human heart, full of people and ideas * The Times * With touches of Alan Hollinghurst, the musings of the book's protagonist on the radical power of art to act as a catalyst for personal change make it an exhilarating, erudite read * Vogue * Interrogating beauty and meaning in art, Tiepolo Blue rewards rereading. Pointing to masked, tricksy identities, clues glitter gem-like amid hallucinatory prose . . . a stylish tale of love and long-game revenge * Royal Academy Magazine * An absorbing coming-of-age story * The Art Newspaper * Bringing together the Italian masters and the Young British Artists, this is a debut that looks at art, power, academia, and the potential of the urban setting at the end of the 20th century * Dazed.com * Simmering * Esquire * Most giddying are the passages that evoke the slow-mo slide of Don's professional collapse . . . I shivered with awful delight -- Alex Diggins * The Critic * The worlds of art, academia and queerness collide in James Cahill's debut * i-D * Th

James Cahill has worked in the art world and academia for fifteen years. His debut novel, Tiepolo Blue, was shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, and his writing has been published in Artforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph, among others. James divides his time between London and Los Angeles.