Any book set in Florence is likely to be a hit with me though, come to think of it, there have been some stinkers. What I liked most about the book was the creation of a family for the main character, Ulysses Temper, from a group of people not one of whom is any blood relation of his.
A captivating, bighearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster, by the celebrated author of Tin Man.
Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her…
I was in troduced to Niall Williams when my book club chose his This is Happiness, something I would never have picked up because of the wishy-washy title. I now want to read everything by him. I liked this one even better.
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That's how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.
So says Ruthie Swain. The bedridden daughter of a dead poet, home from college after a collapse (Something Amiss, the doctors say), she is trying to find her father through stories--and through generations of family history in County Clare (the Swains have the written stories, from salmon-fishing journals to poems, and the maternal MacCarrolls have…
This is the account of the explosion in Delft in the 17th Century that killed so many people, including Carl Fabritius, who was working on The Goldfinch, which was miraculously saved. The writer links it cleverly to her late artist father, in which it is a bit like H is for Hawk.
'Brilliant ... rush out and buy it' Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes
A stunning new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and what a shared love of a painting can come to mean.
'We see with everything that we are'
On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch and barely a dozen known paintings. The explosion that…
