Explore More Magazine Summer 2019

VIKING Book Club If

VIKING Book Club If you’re on the lookout for a new read, your search is over! Here is our round-up of the best novels inspired by the themes of art and painting WHAT I LOVED By Siri Hustvedt Sceptre, £14.99 In 1975 art historian Leo Hertzberg stumbles upon an extraordinary painting in a downtown SoHo gallery in New York. Leo buys the painting and tracks down Bill Wechsler, the artist, and they embark on a life-long friendship which delves into their relationship with each other and with their families. The contemporary art scene is ever-present throughout the novel, as are themes of aesthetic meaning, love and loss. This story will stay with you long after you finish turning the pages. GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING By Tracy Chevalier Harper Collins, £8.99 Inspired by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and his famous painting ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, this story is set in 17th-century Holland and follows a modest 16-year-old called Griet who becomes a maid in Vermeer’s house. She is noticed by the painter and soon becomes his muse, but their closeness gives rise to jealousy both within the house and beyond. Beautifully written, the book explores what happens when sacrifices are made in the name of art. THE MUSE By Jessie Burton Picador, £8.99 A tale of two women, 30 years apart, this novel centres around a lost masterpiece with a secret history. In the 1960s, Odelle Bastien is working in a small gallery in London when the painting ignites her imagination and her interest. Through it, she is transported back to Olive’s story 30 years earlier. Olive Schloss, the daughter of an art dealer, is relocated to rural Spain where she meets a Spanish Republican whose presence proves to be explosive. An unforgettable novel about identity, authenticity and love. THE GOLDFINCH By Donna Tartt Abacus, £9.99 At the age of 13, Theo Decker survives an explosion in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that kills his mother who had just shown him her favourite painting in the gallery. He is urged by a dying man to take the painting, ‘The Goldfinch’ by Carel Fabritius, and as time passes it draws him into the criminal underworld. Alienated and alone, he moves in increasingly dangerous circles in this haunting story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention. THE BIRTH OF VENUS By Sarah Dunant Virago, £8.99 Set in late 15th-century Florence, this novel is constructed as a memoir of Alessandra Cecchi, who as a 15-year-old girl met a dashing young painter who was commissioned to paint the family’s chapel. Risking everything, she begs him to teach her to paint, but he refuses. When an older man asks her to marry him and reassures her she would be allowed to paint she agrees. However, things soon start to unravel when she realises her husband is not all that he seems. Medici Florence provides a stunning backdrop for this captivating tale. HOW TO BE BOTH By Ali Smith Penguin, £8.99 This inventive book features a dual narrative, splitting the book into two parts which can be read in either order. Inspired by painting’s fresco technique, this approach binds two tales of love and injustice into a single thread, linking the stories of a renaissance artist of the 1460s, Francesco del Cossa, with a child of the 1960s, George. Playfully twisting life and death, truth and fiction, this novel is a modern-day masterpiece. PHOTOS: © GETTY 60 VIKINGCRUISES.CO.UK | SUMMER 2019

BOOK CLUB SUTUMN 2018 | VIKINGCRUISES.CO.UK 61