Author:Marina Warner
Like Visconti's film The Leopard, this magnificent novel paints in sensuous colours the story of a family. It brings to new life the ancient disparaged south of the Italian peninsula, weakened by emigration, silenced by fascism.
According to family legend, David Pittagora died as a result of a duel. His death is the mysterious pivot around which his grand-daughter, an independent modern woman, constructs an imaginary memoir of her mother's background and life. She follows the family as they emigrate to New York - where they find only humiliation and poverty - and after their return to Italy in the early 1920's. As she is drawn by the passions and prejudices of her own imagination, we see how family memory, like folk memory, weaves its own dreams.
An idiosyncratic and haunting novel: lush, slow-paced, sensual, metaphorical and, at the same time, anxiously worrying over the demands of kinship and the trail of history... This is a cultural historian's novel and the scholarly curiosity that went into Marina Warner's fine books of female myths and iconography makes here for a devotedly careful recreation
—— Hermione Lee , ObserverWarner's language and pace astonish and reward. Her characters, male and female, elderly and children, strike again and again the unexpected true note, whether playing, grieving, lusting, skinning fowl for dinner or complaining about politics
—— Marianne Wiggins , Sunday TimesThe Lost Father has all the pleasure of a literary crossword puzzle, combined with a brilliantly realised women's world... It is Warner's best novel so far
—— Lorraine Fletcher , GuardianMarina Warner's fiction has a slow, dreamy quality that is at once pleasurable and slightly sinister... This is a moving book, and a very bookish one
—— Lorna Sage , Times Literary SupplementThe Illumination is a quietly ambitious work ... Brockmeier clears a space for the exploration of beauties and pains that in a cruder novel might have been sentimental
—— Michael Sayeau , Times Literary SupplementA novel of slight eccentricity and great tenderness
—— Kate Saunders , The TimesBrockmeier is such a good stylist
—— Claire Allfree , MetroGentle notes instil a sense of humour and hope in a world that is full of darkness even when it is bathed in light
—— Nicola Meighan , The ListThe novel follows a handwritten journal full of love notes from a husband to his wife as it passes through six pairs of hands. Each section is like a self-contained short story; exploring the meaning that each of the recipients takes from this testament of love
—— Alastair Mabbott , HeraldThe Illumination has a fantastically original premise...the writing quality was excellent and I'm sure I'll remember scenes from this book for a long time to come. It is a wonderfully unique novel. Recommended
—— Farm Lane Books BlogIt is a delicate and intriguing look at something we ultimately all have in common
—— Bookgeeks.co.ukGloriously inventive and original, euphorically daring in scope - reminds you that fiction can be energetic and boundary-breaking
—— Julie Myerson , New Statesman, Books of the YearAn inspiring take on suffering and the often fleeting nature of connection
—— Publishers WeeklyThis is a radiant, bewitching, and profoundly inquisitive novel of sorrow, perseverance, and wonderment
—— Booklist
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