"They call us guards, warders, invigilators, room keepers, gallery assistants. We are watchmen, sentinels, but we don#146;t polish guns, shoes or egos. We are custodians of a national treasure, a treasure beyond value stored behind eight Corinthian columns of a neoclassical façade, the dreams of the ancients stuccoed to our building." Half by chance, half following an ancestral call, Marie works as a museum guard at the National Gallery in London. Amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings charged with power and fragility. There also lies the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the warder who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery#146;s masterpieces -- Velázquez#146;s Rokeby Venus -- on the eve of the First World War. Drawn to these transgressors and the omens they bring with them, and after nine years at the National Gallery, Marie begins to feel restless. At home she guards another, more humble, collection -- her handcrafted miniature landscapes -- where she also remains a remarkably oppressive custodian of her own desires.

A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, itself a city steeped in a pervasive past. With the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, Marie#146;s carefully contained world is torn apart. Asunder is a rich, resonant novel of beguiling depths and full of the beautiful strangeness we have come to expect from Chloe Aridjis.