I love biographies of independent-thinking,
intrepid, creative women, and this did not disappoint.
Featuring three 20th-century
women, Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse, and Peggy
Guggenheim, an Italian, a Brit, and an American, Mackrell documents the years
each woman spent inhabiting the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on
the Grand Canal in Venice, imprinting it with her unique personal style.
Set in pre-and-post-WWII Venice, during bygone periods of high glamor, filled with a cast of colorful
characters, The Unfinished Palazzo is both an account of these unconventional
and fascinating women and the history of an 18th-century
palace that today houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, making it one of the
most visited museums in Venice.
Commissioned in 1750, the Palazzo Venier was planned as a testimony to the power and wealth of a great Venetian family, but the fortunes of the Venier family waned and the project was abandoned with only one storey complete. Empty, unfinished, and in a gradual state of decay, the building was considered an eyesore. Yet in the early 20th century the Unfinished Palazzo's quality of fairytale abandonment, and its potential for transformation, were to attract and inspire three fascinating women at key moments in their lives: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse and Peggy Guggenheim. Each chose the Palazzo Venier as the…
I live on the Atlantic in Portugal, where a member of my women’s group is Victoria Whitworth’s sister. She mentioned Swimming with Seals, when one evening, our group met for a cold water swim, the backdrop to Victoria’s unusual memoir.
Flowing from one topic to the next with the ease of the accomplished writer that she is – incorporating her Facebook posts on the weather, tides, and temperature – she chronicles her daily cold water swims off Orkney Island, her encounters with seals, orca, and birdlife, while narrating her personal story, juxtaposed with historical anecdotes, myth, and folklore.
I’m not a fan of cold water swimming, but I loved reading about it, especially as an allegory for embracing life’s ebbs and flows.
A book about intense physical and personal experience, narrating how Victoria Whitworth began swimming in the cold waters of Orkney as a means of escaping a failing marriage.
This is a memoir of intense physical and personal experience, exploring how swimming with seals, gulls and orcas in the cold waters off Orkney provided Victoria Whitworth with an escape from a series of life crises and helped her to deal with intolerable loss.
It is also a treasure chest of history and myth, local folklore and archaeological clues, giving us tantalising glimpses of Pictish and Viking men and women, those people…
Ashton Hall, though
not marketed as historical fiction, reads as such as it investigates a period
of Elizabethan England. And for that reason, as a fan of this genre, I
thoroughly enjoyed this book.
There are several contemporary subplots, including
the protagonist's experiences as an American living in the UK, her failing
marriage to a bi-sexual, and her spectrum-syndrome son whose detective-like
curiosity leads to the story's main action, all of which provide very
surprising plot twists!
But it was the exploration of Elizabethan England
through the discovery of the 16th-century remains of a young woman's
body within the walls of Ashton Hall, a manor home where the protagonist and
her son are staying, that was most illuminating.
An American woman and her son unearth the buried secrets and past lives of an English manor house in this masterful and riveting novel from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Belfer.
“Infused with the brooding, gothic atmosphere of Jane Eyre or Rebecca . . . a novel that must be savored, one page at a time.”—Melanie Benjamin, author of The Children’s Blizzard
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times
“How many lives can you imagine yourself living?”
So Hannah Larson wonders. When a close relative falls ill, Hannah and her young son, Nicky, decide…
Hello, I’m Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast.
And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom — reminding us all that women can do extraordinary things.
