In the cafés and cramped studios of pre‑war Montparnasse, Frederick Tarr, an ambitious English painter, treats love as a laboratory test for his artistic will. Determined to escape the sentimental pull of his German fiancée, Bertha Lunken, he is drawn to the dazzling Anastasya Vasek – but her intelligence and sensuality challenge his detachment. Circling them is Otto Kreisler, a destitute German artist whose wounded pride and desperation erupt into a darkly comic chain of events.

Famous as the leader of the avant-garde Vorticist art movement in England in 1914, Wyndham Lewis explored the darker impulses of the human ego in both his writing and his painting. A scathing satire of the Bohemian lifestyle, as well as an intricate psychological study, Tarr was based on his own experience. It is one of the most explosive modernist novels of the early 20th century – intellectually exhilarating and unflinching in its portrayal of sex, art and self‑deception.

‘The most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time’ Ezra Pound

This recording uses Lewis’s revised 1928 edition.