Synopses & Reviews
When ancient notebooks turn up in a Long Island garage, Peter Van Overloop, a Columbia graduate student, sets to translating them, and finds himself immersed in the life and times of the Dutch painter Frans Hals. for the notebooks seem to be Hal's diaries, and they contain a fascinating portrait of a man living in the age of Rembrandt and Descartes, and bursting with a lust for the world that surrounds him. Emerging as a thoroughly funny, charming man, Hals reaches out from centuries past to touch and change Peter's life forever.
A seamless merging of literary invention and historic fact, The Lost Diaries of Frans Hals is a remarkable, unforgettable novel.
Review
"Wonderfully imagined and meticulously described, the story throbs with vitality and warmth." -
-The Los Angeles Times"Delightful...the beguiling creating of a clever author's whimsy." --The New Yorker
"From present-day New York to seventeenth-century Holland, this imaginative, enthralling first novel conjoins the marginalized struggles of two creative, impoverished and sometimes desperate men separated by more thn three centuries...These beautifully realized diaries brim with timeless insights on matters both lofty and mundane." --Publishers Weekly
"Engaging...elegantly straightforward." --Philadelphia Inquirer
"Grand fiction, with an absolutely perfect ending. A great read." --Detroit Free Press
About the Author
Michael Kernan was a reporter for the
Washington Post for twenty-three years. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.