Au Revoir, April
Round up, links, and chat
This will be a quick one as I’m away in Pittsburgh packing up my daughter’s apartment with her, as she finishes her sophomore year at university. I’ve had a funny month - the excitement of a new book out dulled by a few weeks of being under the weather. April has rather drifted by. I’ve only read six novels this month and my sister posts have all arrived en masse, like buses sometimes do. I hope not quite so annoyingly though.
In case you missed them, I wrote a series of posts about the artist Egon Schiele and his relationships. This one is about the Harms sisters:
Portrait flapping courtship? Yes, really.
As regular readers will know, since I came across a drawing of Beatrix Whistler and her sister in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston last year, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the hidden stories of women we see in works of art. In pursuit of the sitters in Matisse’s sister triptych and the Pettigrew sisters, who frequently sat for Whistl…
I also shared what I discovered about Schiele’s own sisters and models, Melanie and Gerti:
Tomato wars and conservation
If you’ve read my post about the Harms sisters, then you’ll have some notion of Egon Schiele’s unconventional style - in art and in life - and also be familiar with Schiele expert and American scholar, Alessandra Comini and her essay about her research into Schiele’s life and the people who sat for him.
And I’ve written about Sophie Haydock’s excellent novel, The Flames:
Love, trust, and sisterhood
If you’ve read my two recent posts about sisters involved in the life of artist Egon Schiele – the Harms sisters and the Schiele sisters – you’ll be familiar with the characters in this excellent novel by Sophie Haydock. She’s writing at the literary end of historical fiction in
I was a little horrified last night to see in the subtitle of that last post I had called Sophie Haydock, Sophie Haddock! Ouch. It was autocorrect, I swear it was. LOL. Anyway it’s fixed now but I’m a little nervous because I’m not the best proofreader and this week I’m flying solo as my proofreader-in-chief (my mum) has gone off for an adventurous holiday to Georgia:
As I close out the first month of being a thriller writer, I’m realizing that on Friday it’s going to be a year to the day since The Scandalous Life of Nancy Randolph was published. Both books seem to be finding their readers and receiving positive reviews which is just wonderful. My publisher, Joffe Books, has even submitted Nancy for a prize which I feel very honored by. I’ve no expectations from it, but the fact they felt it worth submitting means a lot.
This month, The People Next Door was featured on the Big Thrill website’s list of new sister thrillers (proving it’s not just me noticing all the sister stories in the world). And for anyone interested, here’s a link to a fun post I wrote about the experience of changing genres which appeared on M.K. Tod’s A Writer of History blog this week. Her blog is well worth knowing about if historical fiction is your jam.
Next month I’ll be taking a leap away from sister stories in the art world, but I’m not yet sure which direction I’ll be heading in. Let me get out of Pittsburgh today without the car sinking to the tarmac under the weight of all my girl’s clothes and shoes and cute candles and vases, and I promise I’ll get right on it.
In the meantime, thanks for reading and subscribing, and especial thanks if you’ve read, reviewed and/or told your friends about The People Next Door.
Your book is on my TBR list. Good luck packing and hauling your daughter's stuff.