New from Soho Constable: Caravaggio's Angel by Ruth Brandon.
From Marilyn Stasio's review in the New York Times.
A painterly eye for a scholarly subject confers considerable charm on Ruth Brandon’s CARAVAGGIO’S ANGEL (Soho Constable, $25), in which an ambitious art curator, Reggie Lee, tries to make a good impression in her new job at London’s National Gallery by mounting a small Caravaggio exhibition. Reggie is a bit of a romantic goose when it comes to men; even her appreciation of the painter’s 17th-century altarpiece of a saint and an angelhas carnal undertones. (“Whichever way that Angel swung he was a sexy creature.”) But once she starts making trips to France to secure the Louvre’s copy of the painting and finds yet another version in the country home of an old woman who frolicked with the Surrealists in her youth, the contrivances of the plot yield to the appeal of the setting. This part of France was the beating heart of the Resistance, and Brandon catches past and present in one frame, juxtaposing the picturesque beauty of the countryside with vestigial war memories and glimpses of the dark political clouds just beyond the horizon.Visit Ruth Brandon's website.
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