It Happened Tomorrow

On a visit to Australia, Mal, an arts reporter living in France, stumbles onto an art fraud case when she attends the opening of a major exhibition at a prestigious Sydney art gallery. There is something not quite right about the man who is presented as the high-profile French artist Denis Denarius. More

Fraud is no stranger to the world of art. Forged signatures on paintings, fake ‘masterpieces’ and illegal castings of sculptures—all make front-page news. Yet the person we identify as the ‘artist’ usually rings true.

On a visit to Australia, Mal, an arts reporter living in France, stumbles—or thinks she has stumbled—onto a quite different kind of fraud when she attends the opening of a major exhibition at a prestigious Sydney art gallery. There is something not quite right about the man who is presented as the high-profile French artist Denis Denarius. She convinces her brother Parry to accompany her back to France to investigate. Once there, Mal also enlists the aid of her husband Ludo and his lawyer sister Apolline.

Their search for the artist takes them from mountains of Haute-Savoie to the hillside villages of Provence in an increasingly bizarre set of circumstances.

In It Happened Tomorrow, Susan Steggall, an art historian with a love of art on the edge, combines erudition and humour in an entertaining tale of love lost and found against a backdrop of dirty deeds and warped ambition.