My husband bought me The Muse for our first wedding anniversary (paper). It is so beautifully designed and bound that even without reading, it was the perfect gift. Happily, the content lives up to the cover.
The book moves between two ever interwoven stories, that of Odelle Bastien, a Trinidadian living in London in 1967 and Olive Schloss and her family, recently arrived in the Spanish village of Arazuelo in 1936.
Odelle is a budding writer, who begins a job at the Skelton Gallery where she is taken under the wing of the enigmatic and secretive Marjorie Quick. Life gets even more interesting for Odelle after meeting a man with a mysterious painting.
30 years earlier, Olive and her family move to Spain when the country is on the brink of civil war and these fractures are echoed in her own family dynamic. Like Odelle, Olive is driven by creativity which only increases after meeting the anarchist Isaac Robles.
As with her earlier work, The Miniaturist, Burton combines beautifully poetic language with fantastic storytelling. This book has some similar themes to The Miniaturist, particularly that of strong women, but the story and setting are refreshingly original.
Stephens Reads 