Author:Peter Everett
At seventy, Henri Matisse is a trim, clean old gentleman with a passion for naked women. He is UN MONSTRE SACRE who depicts with passion and conviction only what he takes pleasure in, only what he chooses to see. He is art personified. If there were no Matisse there would be no art as such. . . . He has purged everything from his painting except anxieties concerning structure and colour; his struggle is with these alone! MATISSE'S WAR is a minutely researched yet fictional account of Matisse's life during the years 1939-1945. It is also a superb portrait of the lives of the major French artists and writers under the German occupation. Louis Aragon, Malraux, Picasso and Bonnard all appear prominently in the narrative.
Brilliant, fiercely intelligent and moving
—— A.S.ByattA truly persuasive evocation of artistic France in the last war... A brilliant recreation of a lost period
—— John Fowles, Books of the Year , GuardianA remarkable and very good writer... Everett writes with a rare vividness. He takes a sensuous pleasure in what he sees, and he has a fine ability to translate this into words that have the immediacy of one of Matisse's paintings
—— Allan Massie , ScotsmanAn extraordinary feat of historical and artistic imagining
—— Anton Nickson , Time OutMythical and mystical, Mistress of Spices is reminiscent of fables and fairy tales. . . . The story Divakaruni tells is transporting, but it is her gift for metaphor that makes this novel live and breathe, its pages as redolent as any freshly ground spice.
—— BooklistFor ARRANGED MARRIAGE, 'As irresistible as the impulse which leads her characters to surface to maturity, raising their heads above the floods of silver ignorance'
—— New York Times Book Review