The Glassmaker
A Novel
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4.1 • 9 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Historical Novel of 2024 by The Sunday Times, The Independent, and BookPage
“The Glassmaker is as finely wrought as a dazzling Murano bead. . . . Chevalier reaffirms her status as one of the reigning queens of historical fiction.” —The Independent
“This charming fable is at once a love story that skips through six centuries, and also a love song to the timeless craft of glassmaking. Chevalier probes the fierce rivalries and enduring loyalties of Murano's glass dynasties, capturing the roar of the furnace, the sweat on the skin, and the glittering beauty of Venetian glass.” – Geraldine Brooks, author of Horse
From the bestselling historical novelist, a rich, transporting story that follows a family of glassmakers from the height of Renaissance-era Italy to the present day.
It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers on Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes.
Skipping like a stone through the centuries, in a Venice where time moves as slowly as molten glass, we follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss, from a plague devastating Venice to Continental soldiers stripping its palazzos bare, from the domination of Murano and its maestros to the transformation of the city of trade into a city of tourists. In every era, the Rosso women ensure that their work, and their bonds, endure.
Chevalier is a master of her own craft, and The Glassmaker is as inventive as it is spellbinding: a mesmerizing portrait of a woman, a family, and a city as everlasting as their glass.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring) underperforms in this oddball fantastical epic about a Venetian glassmaker who ages incredibly slowly from the late 15th century, when she is a child, through the present day, when she's in her late 60s. Chevalier introduces the conceit in a prologue: "The City of Water runs by its own clock." Orsola Rosso's glassmaker family's profits are threatened in 1486 when her father, Lorenzo, dies in an accident. Orsola finds an unexpected ally in a woman glassmaker from another family who arranges for her to learn how to make glass beads so she can help support the family as her oldest brother Marco struggles to keep the business afloat. After Marco goes missing following a failed deal, a hunky stranger joins the Rosso enterprise as an apprentice, triggering a predictable romantic subplot between him and Orsola that's unenhanced by clunky prose ("He wore brown breeches tight as a gondolier's, and she could not take her eyes off the movement of his generous, muscled backside"). Chevalier then jumps to 1574, as Venice confronts the ravages of the plague. As the novel proceeds, historical events become even more compressed—Chevalier summarizes the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century as marking "the fastest, most extreme change ever." The superficial perspective gives the impression that the time jumps are window dressing for the clichéd story of a woman's determination to push back against societal constraints. Readers will be left scratching their heads.
