Book description
'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…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Thunderclap as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
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.
I love the painting of the Dutch Golden Age for its humanity. All of life is there in its calm domesticity.
In Dutch hands, even a tied bunch of asparagus attains the luminosity of an Assumption, as Laura Cumming reveals as she weaves a memoir of her father, also a painter, with the story of Carel Fabritius, the artist of The Goldfinch, most of whose work was destroyed in the same sudden moment as his life in an accidental munitions explosion in Delft in 1654.
Thunderclap offers a salutary reminder that life comes at you fast – and death…
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