Synopses & Reviews
After the death of her longtime friend and flatmate, retired British history teacher Julia Garnet does something completely out of character: She takes a six-month rental on a modest apartment in Venice. She befriends a young Italian boy and English twins who are restoring a fourteenth-century chapel. And she falls in love for the first time in her life with an art dealer named Carlo.
Juxtaposing Julia's journey of self-discovery with the apocryphal tale of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael, Miss Garnet's Angel tells a lyrical, incandescent story of love, loss, miracles, and redemption and of one woman's transformation and epiphany.
Review
“Artfully wrought, told with a bracing directness and lucidity . . . a gem.” The Wall Street Journal
Review
“Salley Vickers has created in Agnès Morel a heroine for whom we passionately want the best, even as we fear the worst…Agnèss life is full of surprising complications. Watching Vickers conjure her large cast of characters and make her way through these is, from first to last, a huge pleasure.”—Margot Livesey, author of
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
“Theres a timelessness about The Cleaner of Chartres…Vickers draws on an intimate understanding of human behavior.”—The Bookseller
“Vickers, who had an international hit with Miss Garnets Angel, writes with a sense of hopeful healing.”—Library Journal
“Realism with a subtle fairytale quality….Charming.”—Publishers Weekly
“Salley Vickers is a novelist whose imaginative journey always promises magic and mystery. The Cleaner of Chartres shows her on top form in a rich weave of loss and redemption spiked with Ms. Vickers' irrepressible wit."—Robert McCrum, The Observer (UK)
“The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers is a subtle and ultimately joyous meditation on the nature of sin. The fairy-tale elements of Vickerss novel are delicately layered into a contemporary moral and psychological drama every bit as absorbing as her Miss Garnets Angel.”—Elizabeth Buchan, The Sunday Times (UK)
“With its subtle combination of explorations of faith and love, The Cleaner of Chartres is something of a return to the terrain of Vickerss first novel…Miss Garnets Angel…Each character is drawn with skillful precision.”—The Independent (UK)
About the Author
Salley Vickers is a former university professor of literature and Jungian psychotherapist. Miss Garnets Angel, her first novel, was a book club favorite and an international bestseller. She lives in London and is currently Royal Literary Fund fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, UK. Her latest novel is The Cleaner of Chartres.