This month’s best reads
If ever there was a literary hotel you long to check in to, the Florentine pensione at the pulsating heart of Sarah Winman’s new epic novel is that place. The award-winning author confesses that this story found her back in 2015, when she was on a trip to the Renaissance city. “I was having a late lunch in a neighbourhood restaurant when I noticed on the walls photographs of Florence underwater – what I came to know as the flood of 1966. The owner brought out books for me to look at and told me about the Mud Angels, the young men and women who flocked to the city to help clean up. That was the moment the story came to me and wouldn’t let me go.”
Winman secured an Arts Council grant to spend time in Florence and this enchanting, big-hearted page-turner is the result.
The plot stretches across four decades and begins in 1944 in the bombed wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, where young British soldier Ulysses Temper meets charismatic sixty-something Evelyn Skinner, an art historian who may also be a spy. Something sparks between these two – it’s about the power of art, poetry, love and beauty.
A sweeping saga ensues, hinged partly on a selfless and instinctive act by Ulysses, who saves a suicidal man in a picturesque suburb of Florence under the watchful eye of the tight-knit local butcher, baker, candlestick maker et al. And this incident will later change his life.
We follow Ulysses back to cockney London and the messiness of his marriage; and in another orbit the dance of Evelyn’s life plays out. Will our unlikely pair meet again?
The characters in Winman’s world leap off the page – they are vibrant, flawed, vital, and for close to 500 pages they are ours. It’s a warm and wonderful feeling. Through them we meet great artists and writers of the time who mingle with our colourful throng, which includes Claude, an intuitive blue-fronted Amazonian parrot.
Sarah wants readers to come away from her novel feeling “that people are ultimately good and kind. That empathy sometimes feels a hard emotion to embrace, and yet it is the most powerful state of being to reside in”. And in that she certainly succeeds.
But the rich undercurrent of this filmic tale is all about finding wonder. “I would like readers to be reminded that noticing beauty is a necessary part of our existence. It may be as simple as the fall of light across a table, or a lowering sun, but in that instant, it has affected us on a deep level.” In these times of fear and division, this is a book to enrich us all.