Description
In her fourth novel (after Virgin Blue, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Falling Angels), Tracy Chevalier returns to her most successful format, spinning a lush, rich back story behind a famous masterpiece about which little is known.While it compares favorably with her acclaimed masterpiece, Girl with a Pearl Earring, this beautifully imagined and boldly told novel stands proudly on its own merits. Chevalier's greatest strengths as a writer come from her keen ability to re-create a time and place, in this case 15th-century France and Belgium.
She interweaves narratives of the painter who conceived the six famous images, the tapissier who weaved them onto cloth, and the women in both artists lives to create a magnificent historical novel that brings to life the enigmatic ladies of the tapestries, imagining their identities and circumstances, as well as the meaning of the tapestries about which little is actually known.
This is rich territory for a writer to mine, and Chevalier shows all the impressive strengths of her previous novels. Wonderfully written, freshly conceived, and rich in the details of medieval life, The Lady and the Unicorn is another literary gem from one of our most successful and imaginative writers of historical fiction.
ISBN:9780452285286
