Masters and servants - Pierre Michon

With his debut into English, 'Masters and Servants' captures the intimate and intricate detail work of five artists' lives through exquisitely crafted fiction. The Arles postmaster Roulin reveals Van Gogh's yellow countryside. Spanish women haunt the corners of Goya's Madrid, singsonging his eccentricities. Watteau's secret erotic portraiture captivates a parish priest. Lorentino, an obscure disciple of Piero della Francesca, daydreams of his master while bartering one of his finest paintings for a pig. A stranger spies on Claude Lorrain, becoming mesmerised by the painter's relationship to his landscape, slowly hypnotised by the beauty of the woodlands, as is Lorrain's brush.