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An uplifting novel inspired by a true story, by the New York Times–bestselling author of Lisette’s List and The Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Jean Treadway is a young, cultured New England woman whose every material need is supplied by wealthy, overprotective parents. Through an arranged correspondence, she meets Forrest Holly—a dirt-poor Southern California rancher whose spiritual foundation turns despair into purpose. As different as they are in background, they share two things: they are both blind, and they are both determined to live an active, normal life and raise a family. While Jean was among the first women to use a Seeing Eye dog on urban streets in the late 1930s, Forrest used a seeing-eye bull, and his horses, to guide him on the ranch in the 1940s. As they discover each other through letters that have to be read to them, his earnestness and folksy humor win her heart, leading to an extraordinary life together, shared by their four children.
From Susan Vreeland, bestselling author of such acclaimed novels as Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Luncheon of the Boating Party, and Clara and Mr. Tiffany, comes a richly imagined story of a woman’s awakening in the south of Vichy France—to the power of art, to the beauty of provincial life, and to love in the midst of war. In 1937, young Lisette Roux and her husband, André, move from Paris to a village in Provence to care for André’s grandfather Pascal. Lisette regrets having to give up her dream of becoming a gallery apprentice and longs for the comforts and sophistication of Paris. But as she soon discovers, the hilltop town is rich with unexpected pleasures. Pascal once worked in the ne...
This New York Times bestseller explores the life and many owners of an imaginary Vermeer painting in an “impressive debut collection” of linked stories (Publishers Weekly). A Dutch painting of a young girl survives three and a half centuries of loss, flood, anonymity, theft, secrecy, and even the Holocaust. This is the story of its owners whose lives are influenced by its beauty and mystery. Despite their many troubles and unsatisfied longings, the girl in hyacinth blue has the power to inspire love in all its human variety. This luminous story begins in the present day, when a professor invites a colleague to his home to see a painting that he has kept secret for decades. The professor ...
Hoping to honor his father and the family business with innovative glass designs, Louis Comfort Tiffany launches the iconic Tiffany lamp as designed by women's division head Clara Driscoll, who struggles with the mass production of her creations and grieves the losses of two husbands. By the author of The Girl in Hyacinth Blue.
A collection of short stories explores art through the eyes of everyday contemporary people or the lovers, servants, children, and neighbors who surrounded great Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters.
This luminous story of an alleged 36th Vermeer painting begins in the present day and traces the ownership back to World War II, Amsterdam, and to the work's inspiration.
From the bestelling author of GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE, "A vivid exploration of one of the most beloved Renoir paintings in the world, done with a flourish worthy of Renoir himself" (USA Today) With her richly textured novels, Susan Vreeland has offered pioneering portraits of artists' lives. As she did in Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Vreeland focuses on a single painting, Auguste Renoir's instantly recognizable masterpiece, which depicts a gathering of Renoir's real friends enjoying a summer Sunday on a café terrace along the Seine. Narrated by Renoir and seven of the models, the novel illuminates the gusto, hedonism, and art of the era. With a gorgeous palette of vibrant, captivating characters, Vreeland paints their lives, loves, losses, and triumphs so vividly that "the painting literally comes alive" (The Boston Globe).
"Susan Vreeland set a high standard with Girl in Hyacinth Blue.... The Passion of Artemisia is even better.... Vreeland's unsentimental prose turns the factual Artemisia into a fictional heroine you won't soon forget." —People A true-to-life novel of one of the few female post-Renaissance painters to achieve fame during her own era against great struggle. Artemisia Gentileschi led a remarkably "modern" life. Vreeland tells Artemisia's captivating story, beginning with her public humiliation in a rape trial at the age of eighteen, and continuing through her father's betrayal, her marriage of convenience, motherhood, and growing fame as an artist. Set against the glorious backdrops of Rome, Florence, Genoa, and Naples, inhabited by historical characters such as Galileo and Cosimo de' Medici II, and filled with rich details about life as a seventeenth-century painter, Vreeland creates an inspiring story about one woman's lifelong struggle to reconcile career and family, passion and genius.
This novel of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell “captures the sisters’ seesaw dynamic as they vacillate between protecting and hurting each other” (The Christian Science Monitor). You see, even after all these years, I wonder if you really loved me. Vanessa and Virginia are sisters, best friends, bitter rivals, and artistic collaborators. As children, they fight for the attention of their overextended mother, their brilliant but difficult father, and their adored brother, Thoby. As young women, they support each other through a series of devastating deaths, then emerge in bohemian Bloomsbury, bent on creating new lives and groundbreaking works of art. Through everything—marriage, lover...