Still Life
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4,3 • 4 notes
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- 0,99 €
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- 0,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF DYMOCKS BOOK OF THE YEAR
A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF 2021
A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB PICK
WINNER OF THE INWORDS LITERARY AWARD
‘Sheer joy' Graham Norton
‘Utterly beautiful … filled with hope’ Joanna Cannon, author of Three Things About Elsie
’A gorgeous, generous story of kind hearts and kindred spirits’ Daily Mirror
From the author of When God was a Rabbit and Tin Man, Still Life is a big-hearted story of the families we forge and the friendships that make us.
1944, Italy. As bombs fall around them, two strangers meet in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa and share an extraordinary evening.
Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier, Evelyn Skinner a 64-year-old art historian living life on her own terms. She has come to salvage paintings from the wreckage of war and relive memories of her youth when her heart was stolen by an Italian maid in a particular room with a view. Ulysses’ chance encounter with Evelyn will transform his life – and all those who love him back home in London – forever.
Uplifting, sweeping and full of unforgettable characters, Still Life is a novel about beauty, love, family and friendship.
‘THE most beautiful book … it will stay with me a long time’ Sara Cox, BBC Two’s Between the Covers
‘Extraordinary . . . my book of the year’ Liz Nugent, author of Our Little Cruelties
‘Moving, wise, poetic and funny’ Daily Mail
‘Winman’s pages teem with boisterous, exuberant life’ Sunday Times
Sunday Times bestseller 09/06/2021
About the author
Sarah Winman is author of When God Was a Rabbit, A Year of Marvellous Ways and Tin Man. She lives in London.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winman's lush fourth novel (after Tin Man) begins with a chance meeting in Tuscany in 1944 between a British art historian and an army private. Evelyn Skinner, 64, befriends 24-year-old Ulysses Temper while holed up in a wine cellar as bombs fall. Their paths soon diverge, but Evelyn's suggestion that Ulysses revisit Florence on his own makes a lasting impact. In 1946 London, where Ulysses is now a civilian in a fractured relationship with Peg—the hometown girl he married before the war—the reader meets Alys, the daughter Peg had with an American soldier she met during her husband's absence, and the endearing London pub friends who become Ulysses's family, some of whom eventually join him in Italy in the early 1950s. After the war, Evelyn shuttles between Kent and Bloomsbury, teaching art history and spending time with devoted female lovers. Ulysses and Evelyn finally reconnect in Florence 22 years after their first meeting. Winman covers much ground, including the devastating 1966 flood of the Arno, a cameo appearance by E.M. Forster, and many rich sections about art, relationships and the transcendent beauty of Tuscany, and while it occasionally feels like two novels stitched into one, for the most part it hangs together. Readers will enjoy this paean to the power of love and art.
Avis d’utilisateurs
Just like a film
A beautiful story , well-told, but the language is marred by a few anachronistic expressions and the plot overly contrived, to my taste.
I have enjoyed this sojourn in Florence.
Still Life by Sarah Winman
Sarah writes beautifully and the first two thirds of the book centered on the ambience of Florence was a joy, but in the end it was far too long, the hotel with complaining English speakers was sad and the preponderance of lesbian sex in the final section unnecessary.