Synopses & Reviews
Andrew Marlow, a psychiatrist, has a perfectly ordered life--solitary, perhaps, but full of devotion to his profession and the painting hobby he loves. This order is destroyed when the renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes Marlow's patient.
When Oliver refuses to talk or cooperate, Marlow finds himself going beyond his own legal and ethical boundaries to understand the secret that torments this silent genius, a journey that will lead him into the lives of the women closest to Robert Oliver and toward a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism.
Moving from American museums to the coast of Normandy, from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth, from young love to last love, The Swan Thieves is a story of obsession, the losses of history, and the power of art to preserve human hope.
Review
"A beautiful work of visual art can unhinge even its most ardent admirers, at least those in the grip of the Stendhal Syndrome -- an intense hypercultural swoon (named for the novelist who first wrote about it) accompanied by a rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucination. Such feverish emotions inform Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves, a novel with painting at the center of it." The Wall Street Journal
Review
"As in The Historian, Kostova's visual images are stunning. She uses words to paint the pictures crucial to the plot and then carefully directs readers' attention to background characters, facial expressions and colors important to uncovering the novel's central mystery." Huffington Post
Synopsis
Kostova's masterful new novel travels from American cities to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th, from young love to last love, to create a story of obsession, history's losses, and the power of art to preserve human hope.
About the Author
Elizabeth Kostova is the author of the international bestseller The Historian. She graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress.
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