About The Book

Award-winning author Nancy Huston follows her bestselling novel, Fault Lines, winner of the Prix Femina, with an intensely provocative story about a passionate yet emotionally-wounded woman’s sexual explorations.

After a troubled childhood and two failed marriages, Rena Greenblatt has achieved success as a photographer. She specializes in infrared techniques that expose her pictures’ otherwise hidden landscapes and capture the raw essence of deeply private moments in the lives of her subjects.

Away from her lover, and stuck in Florence, Italy, with her infuriating stepmother and her aging, unwell father, Rena confronts not only the masterpieces of the Renaissance but the banal inconveniences of a family holiday. At the same time, she finds herself travelling into dark and passionate memories that will lead to disturbing revelations.

Infrared is both an explicitly bold story of how sexuality is influenced by childhood, family, and culture, and a portrait of a woman coming to terms with the end of her father’s life. With exceptional flair and intelligence, Huston fearlessly investigates the links between family intimacies and our collective lives, between destruction and creation.

Praise

“An intense and sensual novel.” —France Soir

“Exceptional . . . Vivid . . . Expertly navigated.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Huston shows her mastery of complicated structure, wide culural knowledge, and brilliant, assured portraiture.” —Michael Basilieres, The Globe and Mail (Top 100 Books of the Year)

“There is something eminently subversive in Nancy Huston’s latest novel. A forty-five-year-old women dares to talk about her sexuality, her immense desire for men. But even more, Infrared is a staggering expression of the power of art as salvation.” —Voir (Canada)

“Compelling . . . A finely written examination of sexual politics and the importance of emotional triage.” —George Fetherling, Quill & Quire

“Poetic . . . A ruminative and sensual read.” —Zoe Whittall, National Post (Canada)

“Huston is in top form writing about individual and collective memories, and she knows better than most how to dramatize family destinies.” —Le Monde des Livres

“Infrared, written in lyrical slivers and voluptuous prose is an engaging work.” —Felicity Plunkett, Canberra Times (Australia)

Awards

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year

Excerpt

I use my camera to slip under people’s skin and show their veins, the warmth of their blood, the life pulsing within them. I reveal their invisible auras, the traces left by the past on their faces, hands, and bodies. I explore the ethereal detail of shadows in rural and urban landscapes. I turn foreground into background and the other way around. I set the motionless into motion as no film could ever do. I show how the different periods of our lives echo one another. I connect past to present, here to there, young to old, the dead to the living. In every reportage, I make the acquaintance of one person and do everything in my power to understand what has shaped them. I step to one side with them and enter their homes. I question them and listen to their answers, watch them change masks, play with them and their convictions, study them in the flow of their existence, love them as they love themselves, and leave them freer than I found them. . . . I use infrared to disturb the hic et nunc, which is the very essence of photography.