Portrait of an Unknown Woman

A stunning fictionalized portrait--the story-behind-the-story--of an iconic painting crafted by famed Austrian artist, Gustav Klimt.

Parisian-born author Camille de Peretti takes readers on a labyrinthine fictional journey that explores the alluring, unnamed woman behind a mysterious portrait painted by Austrian visual artist Gustav Klimt.

 

Portrait of an Unknown Woman commences with actual facts about the painting and its origins. The author explains how it was always believed that Klimt painted two images of the same woman: “Damsel” (1910) and “Portrait of a Lady” (1917). In 1996, however, it was discovered by an art student that the two paintings were actually “one and the same.”  For some reason, Klimt altered (painted over) the original painting. Soon after this discovery, the two-in-one painting was stolen on February 22, 1997 and wasn’t found again until 2019, when a gardener at the famed Ricci Oddi Art Gallery in Piacenza, Italy found it perfectly preserved--wrapped in a garbage bag and stashed behind some overgrown ivy.

 

Who was the woman behind the mystery of this sought-after portrait? Why did Klimt paint her twice? And why might the painting have gone missing? These questions drive de Peretti’s passionate imagination as she unfurls a riveting novel about the mysterious woman, Klimt’s model and muse, whose turbulent life mirrors that of the iconic long-lost painting. Readers--those with a penchant for history and art dramas--will be beguiled by a truth-melded-with-fiction-epic that crosses continents from 1900s Vienna to New York City during the Great Depression, all the way to modern-day Italy. de Peretti’s well-conceived, beautifully rendered narrative is anchored in well-researched and documented facts as she creates a stunning, lyrical portrait about family loyalty, secrets and betrayals, and star-crossed love.

 

Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Camille de Peretti (Translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle)

Europa Editions, paperback $19.00, 9798889661788, 256 pages

Publication Date: April 14, 2026

To order this novel on Bookshop.org, link HERE

Learn more about Camille de Peretti HERE

The Sisters of Book Row

A compelling, well-researched novel of historical fiction set in a 1915 Manhattan bookstore run by three smart, fiercely independent sisters.

As she did in her novels The Colony Club and The Tiffany Girls, Shelley Noble once again probes provocative feminist themes in The Sisters of Book Row. This authentically rendered novel of historical fiction explores one family’s ardent passion for books and literature—and the quest for women’s rights.

In 1915, a conglomerate of independent bookstores once filled Fourth Avenue in Manhattan. This included Arcadia Rare Bookshop—a vigorous shop run by the three Applebaum sisters who each bring unique personal gifts to the family business. The sisters, all smart and independent, share a complicated bond. And they each have personal secrets embedded in their hearts. The oldest and most intellectual, Olivia, works behind the scenes as an antiquarian specialist. Daphne, the outgoing middle sister, runs the front end of the shop. And Celia, the youngest, pulls up the slack doing whatever’s required, while also working underground with a group that covertly promotes “women’s health” issues via Margaret Sanger, the foundress of Planned Parenthood. At a time in history when society policed and raided “extremist views,” Celia starts to hide leaflets and pamphlets tied to women's rights in books and other literary ephemera. Her actions soon pose a risk for the family business that also jeopardizes other neighboring bookstores, as well.

 

Noble has crafted a compelling character-driven story that may be set in the early 20^th Century, but the underlying themes explored will resonate deeply with readers today.

The Sisters of Book Row by Shelley Noble

William Morrow (Harper Collins), $18.00 paperback, 9780063423916, 384 pages

Publication Date: March 3, 2026

To order this book on Bookshop.org, link HERE

 

Learn more about Shelley Noble HERE

Happy 2015 !

Opinion:   

Ushering in the New Year with Polka Dots and Pig Cookies 

 How will you launch the New Year?

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Opinion/Editorial: "Other Views/ Guest Columnist" (Section A-19)

BY KATHLEEN GERARD

To read the article in its entirety, click on the highlighted title above

Ask Bob

Peter Gethers' popular memoirs about his beloved cat, Norton, put his name on the literary map. In Ask Bob: A Novel, Gethers tackles fiction, telling the story of Dr. Robert Heller, a prominent New York City veterinarian who also authors a newspaper column called, "Ask Dr. Bob," which addresses the concerns and woes of pet owners. Dr. Bob is no-nonsense in the delivery and approach of his column--and with his patients and their owners--but he's not as direct in his personal life. He comes from a dysfunctional family that has made his role as son, brother, uncle and lover a muddled, thorny challenge. When Bob meets and falls in love with a woman whose family has more issues than his, he takes solace in their romance and the security of his job, concluding that he understands animals better than people. But when tragedy strikes, Bob is forced to step beyond his comfort zone and tend to the people he loves and cares for the most.

Gethers has written a smart, lively novel infused with romance and heartfelt, real-life complications of family and domesticity. The book centers upon the women in Dr. Bob's life who influence him the most during an eighteen-year period from when Bob is 24 years old until he turns 42. The interspersed addition of several of Dr. Bob's newspaper columns and his charming, insightful notes about certain clients and important people in his life add levity and humor to some heavier aspects and themes.

Ask Bob: A Novel by Peter Gethers

Henry Holt and Co., $24.00, Hardcover,  9780805093315, 320 pp

Publication Date: August 6, 2013

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (8/9/13), click HERE

The Widow Waltz

It's not often that a main character in a novel of general literary fiction dies in the first chapter, but that's exactly how Sally Koslow constructs The Widow Waltz. The story opens via the point of view of Ben Silver, a charming, middle-aged, seemingly successful Manhattan lawyer who goes for a run in Central Park only to suffer a massive heart attack. His sudden death comes as a complete shock to those who love him - most especially, his devoted wife, Georgia Waltz. What's even more troubling and upsetting is the news that he has left his well-to-do family practically insolvent. Financial ruin and debt now fall to his widow and their two adult daughters who had been living, thanks to Ben, an upscale, privileged existence. Ben's death might make him physically absent from the lives of his loved ones, but his presence becomes more palpable as the trio slowly begins to uncover reasons why the family's fortune might've evaporated. Was Ben the man they thought he was? Was he harboring secrets? As Georgia and the girls reinvent their lives by selling off assets and scrambling to find work to support themselves, unforeseen circumstances, people and impulses--some romantic--alter their plans in unpredictable ways.

Koslow (The Late, Lamented Molly Marx) is a skillful, meticulous writer attuned to the absurdities of life, death and the multi-generational bonds of family. Pitch-perfect details and alternating narrative voices allow her to fully explore the emotional intricacies of these richly woven characters in crisis.

The Widow Waltz by Sally Koslow

Viking Adult, $27.95 Hardcover, 9780670025640, 352 pp

Publication Date: June 13, 2013

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note:  This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (6/25/13), click HERE

Vanity Fare: A novel of lattes, literature, and love

Molly Hagan is a struggling, forty-year-old single mother who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She suffers the sting of a husband who left her for a younger woman; a traumatized six-year old son who asks too many questions and is begging for an exotic pet; a mother who's financial future has gone belly-up and now has nowhere to live; and well-meaning friends and a shrink who pressure Molly to make changes in her life. Molly's troubles grow even deeper when she learns that she's penniless and can't even pay the rent.

When an old friend offers Molly a copyrighting job for a new bakery, Molly jumps at the chance for employment. The venue is located near the New York Public Library and the owner wants to make the bakery "a destination point, just like the library." Inspired by the challenge, Molly comes up with a "literary-food-is-delicious" schematic for what she envisions will become, "Vanity Fare." In the midst of pulling together her presentation, Molly suddenly finds herself being wooed by a sexy British pastry chef with an "upper-crust, devil-may-care Hugh Grant accent" and his aloof business partner, who becomes more attractive as he forms a bond with Molly's son.

Each chapter commences with blurbs that cleverly pair a syrupy literary reference/pun with a bakery offering such as "Much Ado about Muffins," "A Room of One's Scone" and "Catcher in the Rye Bread." Author Megan Caldwell has whipped up a delicious, well-plotted romance where her smart, self-deprecating heroine conquers real-world issues with good humor.

Vanity Fare: A novel of lattes, literature, and love  by Megan Caldwell

William Morrow, $14.99, Trade paper, 9780062188366,  416 pp

Publication Date: December 26, 2012

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Please note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (1/9/13), click HERE.

The Christmas Tree

The Christmas Tree by Julie Salamon (illustrated by Jill Weber) is a compact story about trees and the deep-rooted emotional meanings they can hold in our lives. 

It is narrated by the chief gardener from Rockefeller Center in New York City and his quest to acquire the immense Norway Spruce from a convent in New Jersey. The book tells the story of Sister Anthony, an elderly nun at the Mother House, who refuses to accommodate the gardener's agenda to cut the tree down for use as the centerpiece in the annual Rockefeller Center Christmas display.  

During the process of many years of negotiations, Sister Anthony ultimately shares her back-story about how, when she was a shy, orphan girl named Anna, she was sent from New York City to live at the convent. Once there, she felt incredibly lonely, but she befriended a tiny fir tree whom she came to call, "Tree." Anna and Tree grew up together and it was through their life-long union that Anna came to love and appreciate the wonders of nature - a breadth of knowledge she generously passes on to the next generation. 

One winter, when a harsh storm threatens Tree's safety, Sister Anthony begins to have second thoughts about the tree becoming the crown jewel at the Rockefeller Center.

This is a sensitive, simply told and moving story, a perfect December read about growth, memory, love and letting go. You'll never look at a tree, or Rockefeller Center at Christmas-time, the same way.

The Christmas Tree by Julie Salamon; Jill Weber (Illustrator)
Random House, Paper, 9780375761089, 128pp.
Publication Date: October 29, 2002
To purchase this book via INDIEBOUND click HERE

This blog post was originally featured on "Reading Between the Lines" on December 5, 2010. The full post from that date can be read HERE.

Cleaning Nabokov's House

What does the cover of this book say to you?  It's part of what intrigued me and led me to it...

Love and longing (and fondly remembering) a missing, deceased father is what anchors Barbara Barrett back to the world and her life when this divorced mother of two is deemed by a court as "psychologically unstable" to care for her children. In Cleaning Nabokov's House, Leslie Daniels has written a uniquely original debut novel that transcends grief and breathes levity (and often, unbelievable) satirical absurdity into a story that might have, in less clever creative hands, flat-lined into melodrama.

When the book opens, the reader joins Barbara's story after the court order has been handed down, and she is scrambling to pick up the pieces of her shattered life and figure out a way to get her children back. Barbara, originally a Manhattanite, feels like an outcast since moving to her ex's (and now also her children's) hometown of Onkwedo, New York (a fictionalized version of Oneida). She feels stuck in a rut. Her lackluster job at a small dairy, writing response letters to disgruntled ice cream consumers and the like, isn't much help either. But her luck suddenly changes when she moves into a house once inhabited by the great Vladimir Nabokov, the author of the seductive classic, Lolita. Tucked behind a false wall in the house, she discovers a manuscript she believes is an unpublished masterpiece written by Nabokov himself about Babe Ruth...of all people.  Could having the novel authenticated and getting it published serve as a winning lottery ticket to fulfill Barbara's quest? It is this discovery, along with a cast of equally quirky and absorbing characters, that ultimately empowers Barbara to reinvent her life in often laugh-out-loud ways that she, and the reader, could never have imagined.

Cleaning Nabokov's House by Leslie Daniels
Touchstone, Hardcover, 978-1439195024 , 336 pp
Publication Date: March 1, 2011
To purchase this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

The Three Weissmanns of Westport

She has been called the Jewish Jane Austen. She writes intelligent, witty, social satires. Her name is Cathleen Schine, and her latest, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, is a modern family saga about marriage, money, love, aging, and real estate (the themes are not necessarily addressed in that order).

The plot is this: Seventy-five year-old Betty Weissmann thought she was happily married until Joseph, her husband of forty-eight years, comes home one day and announces that he is divorcing Betty due to "irreconcilable differences." The irreconcilable difference is Felicity, Joseph's mistress, a younger woman who has designs on the couples' posh Central Park West apartment. Betty is essentially thrown out of her own home.  She moves to Westport, Connecticut, into an old, run-down beach bungalow offered by a cousin.  Betty's loyal and devoted daughters, in their 50s and with problems of their own, rush to their mother's side.

Miranda is a Type-A workaholic literary agent whose career is in crisis thanks to a James Frey-type scandal surrounding one of the authors she represents. Annie, the older sister and a mother of two grown sons, is a rather staid library director, more pragmatic and prone to worry. The three women--with vastly different personalities and quirks, strengths and weaknesses--unite against the injustice bestowed by Joseph. In a show of solidarity, the three women move into the bungalow together. While the daughters think they have come on the scene to support their mother, it is Betty who ultimately rescues her daughters from some very complicated romantic entanglements and the woes of midlife.

As always, Schine's work reflects an authentic New York-Metro area sensibility. She is a master of revealing perceptive, often hilarious, insights about her characters (see also The New Yorkers, She is Me and The Love Letter), while also weaving unexpected twists into her page-turning plots. Chapter Thirteen of The Three Weissmanns of Westport, when the three women set off to celebrate Christmas, Jewish-style, in Palm Beach, is a perfectly paced scene of farce-like proportion. It speaks to the heart (and heartbreak) of the human condition. Once again, Schine shines!

Strength in What Remains

You never know just who might be bagging your groceries at the food store . . . Such is the case with the central character in the latest book by Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains), a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has carved out his own niche in the creative nonfiction genre. Kidder is a gifted writer who crafts well-plotted, page-turners about real people in the throes of real life events. In STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS, he tells the story of Deo, a young man who is in the midst of his medical education when he suddenly finds himself caught up in the genocide that infiltrates his homeland of Burundi (Africa).

A violent, tribal war between the Hutus and the minority Tutsis, forces Deo (a Tutsi) to be swept away from his family. On the run, he escapes death while witnessing graphic and horrific evils. With $200 in his pocket, Deo gets himself on a plane bound for New York (he thinks he's actually going to Belgium) where a cast of strangers, who appear more like angels of providence, begin to help him make a new life in America.

There is a baggage handler at Kennedy Airport who assists Deo through immigration and helps him navigate around New York City. Deo lands a job bagging groceries (working for a boss who is a demeaning tyrant), while he camps out in abandoned buildings in Harlem and later in Central Park. One day, while delivering groceries, he meets an ex-contemplative nun who, after learning of Deo's plight, takes him on as her quest. She sets out to find Deo a proper home and enlists the help of a couple (middle-aged intellectuals) who let Deo camp out in the library of their apartment in SoHo. For the next seven years, it is through the generosity of this couple and the persistent effort of the ex-nun, that Deo is able to return to pursuing his education, studying at Columbia and later, Harvard.

The story is told in a parallel structure. Scenes from Deo's life in New York are intercut with scenes from Deo's harrowing experience amid the terrors of the Burundi genocide. In the last third of the book, the author himself joins the action in Deo's quest to raise money to create (from the ground up, literally) a public health system to aid folks in contemporary Burundi.

It's an extraordinary story.  But for me, I wondered where and how Deo derived his inner strength. His name Deo or Deogratias translates to "Thanks be to God." Before the genocide and even after all the horrors Deo witnessed, what were his core beliefs? What was the level of his spirituality?  

The two paragraphs below (page 186) are beautifully rendered, and they offer the only glimpse of insight to shed light on this point:

Before we left, Deo wanted to visit some of his favorite extracurricular spots: the benches overlooking Harlem on Morningside Drive and the Riverside Church and finally St. John the Divine, the immense unfinished Gothic cathedral in Morningside Heights...We sat down in a pew some distance from the grand altar. There seemed to be a service in progress up there, but we were seated too far away to hear it. "It really blows my mind," said Deo. "The first time I was here I was taking art (at the university) and I said, 'God, if the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican is better than this . . . " He laughed. "I mean, just look at it."

We were surrounded by towering columns. The place was vast, dark, and mysterious. We talked quietly. I had the impression it was in this place and in his other sanctuaries that Deo had reconciled his experience of genocide with his belief in God. He liked to frame his solution jocularly: "I do believe in God. I do believe in God. I think God has given so much power to people, and intelligence, and said, 'Well, you are on your own. Maybe I'm tired, I need a nap. You are mature. Why don't you look after yourselves?" Deo would pause, then say, "And I think He's been sleeping too much."

Kidder makes the case that Deo, a student of philosophy, believes in action more than reflection. But did it ever cross Deo's mind or did he ever consciously recognize positive forces greater than himself at work - forces that saved him, opened doors of opportunity and ultimately enabled him to achieve his goals and give back to those in his homeland?