After suffering through Alice Adam’s Invincible Summer (my pick, sorry book club members), I was quite smitten with this work. Case in point: The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith. But such is the life of a reader and as with many things in life, we need the bad to help us appreciate how truly beautiful the good ones are. I even selected and fought for a few book club selections which, upon completion, I was thoroughly embarrassed by. (You think I jest.) So far, so good, although my little man knocking out at 8pm inevitably means a 5am sleep-eating marathon.Was one of your resolutions to read more? How about to read better books? I can’t say that every novel I read in 2016 was a winner. I also resolved to get my toddler to bed before 11pm.

Happy New Year and cheers to the first post of 2017! (I’m supposed to be publishing every week, so if you catch me slacking, please call me out!) I’m not big on resolutions since I am the queen of inconsistent but I did map out a general plan for the year concerning travel (my husband laughed at my ideas for this one and said to think smaller), business moves, and various gatherings and expected major expenses. This audio-book includes a reading group guide read by the author. Because now, half a century later, she's curating an exhibit of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive.Īs the three threads intersect, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerizes while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain - a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St.

Now, in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, he deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the golden age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth. In his award-winning earlier novels, Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the audio's done.

A masterful new story charts the circuitous course of the sole surviving work of a female Dutch painter.

The last painting of sara devos