Still Life: A GMA Book Club Pick
A Novel
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4.2 • 299 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick
A Veranda Magazine Book Club Pick
A captivating, bighearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster, by the celebrated author of Tin Man.
Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her own youth. In each other, Ulysses and Evelyn find a kindred spirit amidst the rubble of war-torn Italy, and set off on a course of events that will shape Ulysses's life for the next four decades.
As Ulysses returns home to London, reimmersing himself in his crew at The Stoat and Parot—a motley mix of pub crawlers and eccentrics—he carries his time in Italy with him. And when an unexpected inheritance brings him back to where it all began, Ulysses knows better than to tempt fate, and returns to the Tuscan hills.
With beautiful prose, extraordinary tenderness, and bursts of humor and light, Still Life is a sweeping portrait of unforgettable individuals who come together to make a family, and a deeply drawn celebration of beauty and love in all its forms.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
English author Sarah Winman’s writing dances on the line between poetry and prose. Her joyful and spellbinding fourth novel is set during World War II and the following decades, and tells the story of former English soldier Ulysses Temper, who, after a tour in Italy, receives an unexpected inheritance: a home in Florence. This gives his unorthodox family—including a child, a parrot, and an old friend—a place to begin again. Still Life feels both epic and intimate. It’s a startlingly beautiful, hugely original celebration of art, nature, and every kind of love.
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.
Customer Reviews
Still Life
Beautiful poetic story of life and the characters that fill it
Captivating
One of the most glorious books I’ve read in a while. Loved the theme and characters. I did not want it to end.
A Very Moving Book
Irony intended.
This is a wonderful book. We’ll wait a few years to be absolutely sure, but it will very likely be still treasured, re-read, and recommended.
The reader will be rewarded with beautiful passages that beg to be read aloud to others and quoted into your journal. There are characters to care about so much you are filled with a sense of loss when you turn the last page.
I can’t recommend it highly enough.