The Passion Artist — John Hawkes

Set in an imaginary European city, "The Passion Artist" takes us into the dream-like interior world of Konrad Vost, a middle-aged widower grieving for his dead wife, devoted to his schoolgirl daughter, and obsessed with the memory and the fate of his mother, who is an inmate in the city's prison. When Vost discovers that his daughter has become a prostitute, and that the women prisoners are in revolt, he embarks on a fantastic series of violent and erotic encounters, exploring the shifting balance of power between the sexes, and the limits of human perversity.