The novel based on the film "Egon Schiele - Death and the Maiden." At the beginning of the 20th century, Egon Schiele is one of the most provocative artists of the Viennese Modernism. He causes scandals and is put on trial for allegedly defiling a thirteen-year-old girl. His life and work are marked by eroticism and transience. Women are the driving force of his art, especially his younger sister Gerti and the seventeen-year-old Wally Neuzil - who is likely his only great love and whom he sacrifices for the sake of a "bourgeois" life and his wife Edith. Hilde Berger delves into the fascinating yet disturbing personality of the expressionist painter. Her biographical novel portrays the life of the artist, who died at barely twenty-eight from the Spanish flu, through the eyes of five women who were influential in his artistic work.