Villa America
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3.8 • 6 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling and spellbinding novel about art, love and marriage--in the tradition of The Paris Wife and Above All Things.
Sara and Gerald Murphy's good looks, talent for living and perfectly successful marriage breed both devotion and jealousy amongst their friends. But when Owen Chambers, an American aviator, arrives in their lives, the deep emotional fissures in Sara and Gerald's marriage reveal themselves and their lives change forever.
Villa America is a fictional imagining of the real lives of Americans Sara and Gerald Murphy who, in the heady years of 1920s France, presided over a group of expatriate writers, painters, singers and dancers--including Pablo Picasso and Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This dazzling cast of characters gathered together in the Murphy home in Cap d'Antibe, as both Sara and Gerald cast their elusive magic over all of them.
Spanning 1890s New York, the battlefields of WWI, the birth of aviation, the artistic explosion of 1920s France, the Depression and the rise of fascism, Villa America charts the beautiful and tragic course of three intertwined lives to create a vivid portrait of a gilded age that couldn't last.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Liza Klaussmann finds inspiration in the life stories of Gerald and Sara Murphy—wealthy Americans whose home in the French Riviera was a refuge for some of the most famous artists of the early 20th century, including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Named after the couple’s fabled estate, Villa America is a profoundly moving historical novel. Klaussmann makes every scene sparkle, conjuring a dramatic tale that embodies the idealism, inventiveness and rebellion of a remarkable generation.
Customer Reviews
Villa America
When writing in a foreign language, you need someone intimately familiar with that language as a proof-reader. The "French" in this novel is embarrassing.
Equally embarrassing is "revert back" on page 474. The "back" is inherent in "revert": using it is like printed stuttering. I would have thought the author had been learned to speech goodly enough that she'd be aware of this.
Owen was a very well handled creation.