Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2694 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Times
'A delicately written, beautifully crafted novel.'

Simon Humphreys – Mail on Sunday
'fine novel…an inspired reflection on the redemptive potential of art'

Scotsman Saturday Fiction Round Up.
Rev by Allan Massie.

Customer Reviews

'People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.'
This is a cleverly constructed book with the central motif the painting by Gwen John.

As in the film 'The Red Violin' in which a violin moves across the world and across time frames,so too does the painting go from woman to woman, home to home and we follow its progress through a succession of chapters.
I was captivated by Margaret Forster's ability to adapt her style to the era about which she was writing, beginning and ending the book with the same person in the same era. So a cyclical movement is established and that is entirely appropriate to the concerns of the novel.

' It needs to go from woman to woman, to be part of their lives, affecting them every day.'
We witness the journey by which this picture goes 'from woman to woman' beginning with Gwen John, and then moving from Paris to London and owing to a confusion going to the home of Charlotte, who worships the painting but sees the theft of it as a metaphor for her loss of talent.
Then through a circuitous route through many experiences, until at the end of the book, it is back in Paris and Gillian who saw it when she was on a school Art trip, comes across it again.

When she saw it during the school trip to the Tate Gallery, she said to her teacher 'What effect did it have on the people who have looked at it?'
As one of those people, she comes to realise the effect which it had on all the people in its past and she asks 'Don't artists want to put more than the paint on their canvases?'

Although Gwen John painted it 'to keep the world away' and it 'helped others to do the same' yet also, it became an integral part of many lives.

And through reading this book and seeing a small reproduction of the painting on the back of the paperback copy published by Vintage, it becomes a part of our lives as well.

Val De Beer.

Charming and thought-provoking
I had never read a book by Margaret Forster before, and am utterly smitten. I am now on the search for other books by her, hoping that this was not a "one-off".

A haunting story, utterly absorbing
Until now I was never a great fan of Margaret Forster but I found this book utterly absorbing. The effect of a seemingly unassuming little painting on the women whose lives it touches makes fascinating reading. Each of the characters is convincingly drawn and in such detail that, unlike other books of this type where, just as I become interested, the main protagonist disappears from the pages to be replaced by a stranger, here the transition is so seamless that I barely missed the previous character before becoming immersed in the next.

The story is laced with coincidences - generally best avoided in literature as they can seem contrived. The chance of two identical Harrods trunks appearing in lost property at Victoria Station is quite plausible - most travellers returning from Paris to London in the early 20th Century would have passed through Victoria Station, and the stylish traveller would doubtless choose a trunk from Harrods. But the chance meetings between women who owned the painting (I can't say more without giving away details of the story and possibly spoiling it for those who've not yet read the book) could have felt contrived. Instead, they provided a poignant strand linking the women's stories. How little they realised how close they came to the painting they had lost!

For me it was a haunting story that has stayed with me long after I finished reading it. Margaret Forster fans will love it anyway. But if, like me, you have found some of her other work lacking that special 'something', give this book a try. It's special. I loved it and thoroughly recommend it.