The Marriage Portrait: the Instant Sunday Times Bestseller, Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023

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This book provides the answers, and is also very good at keeping the menacing tone going throughout. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Late in the story, there is a banquet in the castle in Ferrara, when Lucrezia hears for the first time the singing of two castrati.

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell review – a dark The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell review – a dark

Maggie O'Farrell is the author of HAMNET, Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I AM, I AM, I AM, both Sunday Times no. In 1558, Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, was married to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. This is a brutal read but I kept turning the pages despite this which is the hallmark of a master wordsmith. Several grim scenes make clear the mortal consequences of any attempt to escape Alfonso’s clutches: Will Lucrezia take the risk? These animals, like the fantastic creatures writhing through the “grotteschi” decorations of Italian Renaissance palaces, hint at the untamed impulses contained by courtly rituals and cumbersome dresses.Photograph: Alamy The duchess in the tower … Lucrezia de' Medici, who died aged 16 in 1560, is the protagonist in The Marriage Portrait. The instant Sunday Times bestseller from the acclaimed author of Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait is a dazzling evocation of the Italian Renaissance in all its beauty and brutality.

The Marriage Portrait: the Instant Sunday Times Bestseller The Marriage Portrait: the Instant Sunday Times Bestseller

When he strikes his stepson, Jarge learns that he’s made a big mistake: “If you ever touch that boy again,” Sal warns, “I swear I’ll cut your throat in the middle of the night, so help me God. As she listens, the narrative gaze moves around the table – lighting on a spaniel lapping at a dish, a woman wearing stuffed songbirds as ornaments in her hair, a man lasciviously handling a bowl of fruit.

Biography: Maggie O'Farrell is the author of HAMNET, Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I AM, I AM, I AM, both Sunday Times no. A dress speaks a “glossolalia all of its own”, rustling and creaking, becoming an orchestra, or the rigging of a ship. Favourites included Violet Needham (The Woods of Windri), Margaret Irwin (Royal Flush), and – most pertinently here, in terms of subject matter – Marjorie Bowen’s darkly gorgeous The Viper of Milan, much admired by Graham Greene.

THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT | Kirkus Reviews THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT | Kirkus Reviews

Alphonso has him brutally beaten, and his coffin is taken out in the dead of night, with an increasingly desperate Lucrezia witnessing the act. Finely written and vividly imagined, it is far from being simplistic, but there is an engaging simplicity to it that makes it feel not quite like a grown-up novel. There is a virgin heroine whose floor-length red hair, modestly confined in a pearl-decorated net, hints at rebellious energy. I loved Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet so when her latest book was published, I was anxious to read it.A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. When she meets Jacopo, an apprentice to the painter commissioned to create her portrait, she finds a soul mate who perhaps offers a way out of her imprisoning marriage. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. When Wellington confronts Bonaparte at Waterloo, the carnage is horrific as cannonballs rip bodies to shreds. If the measure of a historical fiction novel is its ability to place the reader in the shoes of the main character, then this is a complete success.

The Marriage Portrait: A Novel (Random House Large Print) The Marriage Portrait: A Novel (Random House Large Print)

Before Hamnet, I might have heard of this author, but in the rush of everyday life paid her no particular mind. This is because O'Farrell was inspired by what little is known of the very short life Lucrezia de Meditci who was married off to the Duke of Ferrara when she was 13 and he in his thirties. It has a lot to say, too, about controlling and abusive behaviour (as well as violent and murderous behaviour).The girl is entirely innocent and cast into a family and court where betrayal and political machinations are common and her sense of security is tested. Gone were the shifts between different character's perspectives which are a feature of so many of her books, and instead we focus solely on Lucrezia's point of view. Well worth a read, though, especially if you are an O'Farrell fan, but for me this book will not stay for ever on my bookshelf. She alternates passages of plain prose with others rich in musical cadences and lavishly decorated with imagery and heightened vocabulary.