Villa America - Hardcover

Klaussmann, Liza

3.65

4,100 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385677510 ISBN 13: 9780385677516

Publisher: Bond Street Books, 2015

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A dazzling and spellbinding novel about art, love and marriage--in the tradition of The Paris Wife and Above All Things.
     Sara and Gerald Murphy's good looks, talent for living and perfectly successful marriage breed both devotion and jealousy amongst their friends. But when Owen Chambers, an American aviator, arrives in their lives, the deep emotional fissures in Sara and Gerald's marriage reveal themselves and their lives change forever.
    Villa America is a fictional imagining of the real lives of Americans Sara and Gerald Murphy who, in the heady years of 1920s France, presided over a group of expatriate writers, painters, singers and dancers--including Pablo Picasso and Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This dazzling cast of characters gathered together in the Murphy home in Cap d'Antibe, as both Sara and Gerald cast their elusive magic over all of them.
     Spanning 1890s New York, the battlefields of WWI, the birth of aviation, the artistic explosion of 1920s France, the Depression and the rise of fascism, Villa America charts the beautiful and tragic course of three intertwined lives to create a vivid portrait of a gilded age that couldn't last.

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About the Author:

LIZA KLAUSSMANN is the author of Tigers in Red Weather, a Sunday Times Bestseller for which she won a British National Book Award, the Elle Grand Prix for Fiction and was named Amazon UK's Rising Star of the Year in 2012. A former journalist, Klaussmann was born in Brooklyn, New York, and spent ten years living in Paris. She currently lives in North London. Villa America is her second novel.

Review:

"Klaussmann is a nimble, clever writer who has managed to deliver a weighty story about art, love and the terrible fragility of dreams." —The Globe and Mail

"A luscious, jazz-era read about the real-life, art-commune couple who were the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic Tender Is the Night." ―Toronto Star

"Another sensitive fictional portrait of a complicated marriage from the author of Tigers in Red Weather. . . . Beautifully written and surprisingly fresh."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"[Klaussmann] entwines her fact and fiction with a smooth, near seamless stitch, and the end result makes for exhilarating and moving reading."
―The Observer (UK)

"Brilliant . . . In [Klaussmann's] skilful hands what could have been a clich�d love triangle becomes something much more complex, subtle and moving. . . . How vividly and freshly she renders even the most familiar stories, especially when it comes to the Fitzgeralds. . . . Her Scott and Zelda feel like real people, not jazz age caricatures. . . . A deeply moving portrait of a marriage and of a world." ―Irish Times (Ireland)

"An enticing world, with its jazz-age parties, avant-garde bathing costumes and sexual freedom. . . . Klaussmann's compelling book does justice to this material."
―The Guardian (UK)

"Villa America ranks as one of the summer's loveliest reads." —New York Daily News

"[An] empathetic, beautifully written novel." —The Washington Post

"As a direct descendant of Herman Melville, Liza Klaussmann has classic American literature in her blood. . . . Klaussmann's jazz age repartee is as fizzy as the cocktails and the Murphys' tragic denouement is affecting."
—The Independent (UK)

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