The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

by David Mitchell

‘Unless you win your will back,’ says the girl in the pool, ‘you’ll turn into the others.’ I shall stop taking Suzaku’s drugs, Orito resolves, from tomorrow. The stream leaves the pool through mossy grates. My ‘tomorrow’, she realises, is proof that I must stop today.

over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator;