Liza Klaussmann & Rosie Thomas – London

Villa America – Liza Klaussmann

The Author

Liza Klaussmann worked as a journalist for the New York Times for over a decade. She received a BA in Creative Writing from Barnard College, Columbia University and was awarded the Howard M. Teichman Prize for Prose. She lived in Paris for ten years and completed an MA in Creative Writing with distinction at Royal Holloway in London, where she now resides. She is the great-great-great granddaughter of Moby Dick’s creator Herman Melville. Her award-winning first novel Tigers in Red Weather was the subject of an eight-way auction battle, eventually selling for a seven-figure sum to Little Brown in the US. The foreign rights were sold in 18 territories. Villa America is Liza’s second novel.

Praise for Liza Klaussmann

‘Two things set this enjoyably creepy book apart from your average beach read. The plot and pacing are expertly managed . . . But the real selling point is the writing, which is minimalist and evocative at the same time.’
The Observer

The Plot

When Sara Wiborg married Gerald Murphy they decided, quite deliberately, to create a radiant world together. Their hospitality became legendary, as did their style, their parties and their appetite for the new. At Villa America, their home on the French Riviera, they welcomed the most exciting artists of the 1920s, who adored them and returned year after year. The inspiration behind F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, they were the couple everybody wanted to know. This is their story, from secret courtship to devastating tragedy, re-imagined by Liza Klassmann in a captivating, poised and heart-breaking novel about great art, great loss and great books.

The Illusionists – Rosie Thomas

The Author

Rosie Thomas is the author of a number of celebrated novels, including The Kashmir Shawl, A Simple Life and the Top Ten bestsellers Every Woman Knows a Secret, Moon Island, White and The Potter’s House. With The Illusionists now out in paperback, Rosie is currently putting the finishing touches to her next novel, Daughter of the House which will be published in July.

Once she was established as a writer and her children were grown, she discovered a love of mountaineering. She has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, and spent time on a tiny Bulgarian research station in Antarctica. Her previous novel, Iris and Ruby was the winner of the 2007 Romantic Novel of the Year Award. She lives in London.

Praise for Rosie Thomas

‘Rosie Thomas writes with beautiful, effortless prose, and shows a rare compassion and a real understanding of the nature of love’
The Times

The Plot

London 1870. A terrifying place for a young, beautiful woman of limited means. But Eliza is modern before her time. Not for her the stifling if respectable conventionality of marriage, children and domestic drudgery. She longs for more. Through her work as an artists’ model, she meets the mild-mannered artist Jasper Button, the magnetic and irascible Devil and his right-hand man the improbably-named Carlo Bonami, an ill-tempered dwarf with an enormous talent for all things magical.

Thrown together by a twist of fate, the fortune of one depends on that of the others. And as Eliza gets sucked into the seductive and dangerous world that her strange companions inhabit, she risks not her heart, but also her life…

Bookings

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