A Parade Best New Book
“Travel across seven centuries with novelist Tracy Chevalier and a remarkable Glassmaker ... The Glassmaker conveys a vivid history lesson about a fascinating place and industry, animated through the lives and emotions of compelling characters.” – Star Tribune
“[An] exceptional novel ... Chevalier’s descriptive prose on glassmaking artistry, together with her delightful characters, creates an entrancing tale.” – Christian Science Monitor
“There is an immediate richness to the historical fiction of Tracy Chevalier, one that goes beyond carefully researched details and evocative prose, and into deep emotion. . . . The Glassmaker becomes a study not just of history, but of what endures history. That makes it a potent, bewitching bright spot in a stellar career.” – Bookpage (starred review)
“Tracy Chevalier pens a novel as ambitious, audacious, and artistic as a Venetian glass goblet. Beginning in the height of the Renaissance and hopscotching with casual ease through the centuries to the modern day, she examines the ever-changing city of Venice through the eyes of Orsola Rosso, defiantly gifted daughter of a Murano glassmaking family, and how her unique gift with glass shines through time, fragile but unbreakable. The Glassmaker is a thing of beauty.” – Kate Quinn, author of The Diamond Eye
“Tracy Chevalier returns to the world of medieval craft and gives us another determined heroine—a Venetian glassmaker who penetrates the closed world of the men of Murano. Meticulously researched and evoking the beauty of the Venice lagoon, the story challenges and transports the reader through time and place.” – Philippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl
“A richly-drawn tale about loyalty and heartbreak, as well as a love letter to the craftsmen—and women—who created exquisite treasures that endure through the ages. A stunning achievement. I couldn’t put it down.” – Fiona Davis, author of The Spectacular
“Chevalier, one of our great storytellers, brings us unexpected worlds: Venice and Murano, artisans and empresses, compelling us through six fascinating centuries, with one irresistible family, weaving stories that captivate and transport the reader.” – Amy Bloom, author of White Houses
“Spellbinding…. Chevalier at her fabulous best. A rich, vivid and gently enchanting novel.” – Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees
“In the Venice of The Glassmaker, time moves differently, with hundreds of years passing in the blink of an eye….When one has the chance to live for centuries, love and loss seem to cut more deeply, and the winds of change never stop blowing, which means that the ground is constantly shifting beneath the feet of Chevalier's perfectly drawn characters. Inspiring, heartbreaking, and magical, The Glassmaker is an inventive and extraordinary feat and an epic for the ages.” – Kristin Harmel, author of The Paris Daughter
“A triumph… a brilliant idea carried out with confidence and brio and a deep love of an extraordinary city. The ingenuity of the time-skipping is beyond admiration.” – Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy
“I lost myself in this beautiful book.” – Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky
“This charming fable is at once a love story that skips through six centuries, and also a love song to the timeless craft of glassmaking. Chevalier probes the fierce rivalries and enduring loyalties of Murano's glass dynasties, capturing the roar of the furnace, the sweat on the skin, and the glittering beauty of Venetian glass.” – Geraldine Brooks, author of Horse
“Impressive . . . Between fascinating descriptions of artisans at work and the glassware they create, Chevalier embeds a love story that transcends time as Orsola, across 500 years, holds on to the love she carries for a man she knew in her youth. With colorful narrative and dialogue, Chevalier lets time roll forward through independent women who are determined to shape glass into works of art and frame life paths of their own design. History flows like molten glass in this stunning novel.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“With a story of inventive and heartbreaking transformation, Tracy Chevalier has turned her poetic eye and love of meticulous research to a Muranese family saga spanning 500 years. … A beautifully crafted novel.” – Ytali
Tracy Chevalier's rich tapestry of a novel features the glassmaking Rosso family, who live and work on the island of Murano, off the coast of Venice. Lisa Flanagan keeps the listener engaged as protagonist Orsola Rosso skips through six centuries like a stone skipping across a smooth-as-glass lagoon. Flanagan's exquisite tone, intonation, and pacing allow the listener to stay engaged with this complex story, which takes six centuries to reveal its secrets. Orsola grows from a 9-year-old girl who dreams of making glass in 1486 to a woman in her mid-60s at the end of an illustrious career in the twenty-first century. Flanagan is at the top of her game as she smoothly slips into Italian and Italian-accented English, bringing the dialogue to life. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
★ 2024-04-20
“Time passes differently” in this centuries-spanning story set on the Island of Glass.
This impressive novel about family, art, and tradition takes place on Murano, just off the coast of Venice, Italy, where generations of artisans have created beautiful glassware. Chevalier centers this engaging story on Orsola Rosso, who, as the novel opens in 1486, watches with envy as the men in her family turn molten glass into goblets, platters, and bowls using techniques passed from father to son. Tradition can’t stop Orsola, who learns how to make glass beads that can be used to create exquisite jewelry. The money Orsola earns from her creations will save her family many times over the course of the novel as the world changes and Murano’s fortunes rise and fall. Chevalier cleverly warps the time continuum on Murano—decades can pass, but the people age only a few years. She situates us in the real world, though, where—like swirls of color that appear to flow through translucent glass—history moves forward from the Italian Renaissance through plagues, the Napoleonic era, and world wars up to the 21st century and Covid-19. Time barely ages the Muranese, but their lives are impacted by the outer world’s changes and upheavals. Between fascinating descriptions of artisans at work and the glassware they create, Chevalier embeds a love story that transcends time as Orsola, across 500 years, holds on to the love she carries for a man she knew in her youth. With colorful narrative and dialogue, Chevalier—author of Girl With a Pearl Earring (1999)—lets time roll forward through independent women who are determined to shape glass into works of art and frame life paths of their own design.
History flows like molten glass in this stunning novel that borders on fantasy.
