The Lost Mother, Anne Summers

The Lost Mother, published by Melbourne University Press, is a gripping narrative that is part art history, part detective story and part meditation on the relations between mothers and daughters.

It recounts how after Anne inherited a portrait of her mother as a child, she decides to search for the lost companion painting, where her mother was painted as the Madonna.

The story is both moving, and hypnotic as Anne embarks on a parallel quest to rescue the artist, Constance Stokes, from obscurity and to learn the fate of the mysterious Russian émigré collector who originally bought the portrait.