Annal:1978 Whitbread Book Award for Novel

Picture Palace

Paul Theroux

• 1978 Whitbread-Novel winner
• Score: 10.28

World-famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt has pointed her lens at the beautiful, obscure, and obscene, and at the private places and public parts of the famous, from Gertrude Stein to Graham Greene. When the seventy-year-old Maude rummages through her archives in preparation for a triumphant retrospective, the resurrected images unleash a flood of suppressed memories—of her extraordinary life, her celebrated subjects, and the dark, painful secret at the core of her existence.