The Mollybush Nude

<p>When a painter struggles to sell his work with his career waning he chooses to paint nudes. Jim Read’s THE MOLLYBUSH NUDE grasps at ideas we all ask ourselves: how did life get this way?</p><p>Bill Burnon a sixty-three-year-old landscape painter and Marion Barkley a fifty-nine-year-old diner owner  are separated by six hundred kilometres of highway. Nevertheless they are as close as the wind on a spider’s web. Bill and Marion have loved each other passionately since they were seventeen and thirteen but only in a limited measure: always a summer a modest stretch of some months shorter or longer depending on their unfailing ability to irritate the heck out of each other.</p><p>When Bill's gallery manager suggests painting nudes to give his career a much-needed boost he goes with it. He plans to paint a series of nudes. Deeply Bill wants to paint Marion but when he approaches her about the notion she rebuffs him -- her rejection forces him to find another model.</p><p>Turmoil and jealousy haunt their love when Bill selects Libby for his paintings. She's younger. She's mysterious. She's troubled. A friendship develops between Bill and Libby as Bill wrestles with his new artistic endeavour. </p><p>What happens next nobody in Mollybush could've expected.</p>