Title

Keeping the World Away

Margaret Forster

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Published by Vintage, part of Vintage Publishing

Format: Paperback

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Details

EAN: 9780099496861
Published: 1 Mar 2007

About the book

Synopsis

Lost, found, stolen, strayed, sold, fought over... This engrossing, beautifully crafted novel follows the fictional adventures, over a hundred years, of an early 20th-century painting and the women whose lives it touches.
It opens with bold, passionate Gwen, struggling to be an artist, leaving for Paris where she becomes Rodin's lover and paints a small, intimate picture of a quiet corner of her attic room... Then there's Charlotte, a dreamy intellectual Edwardian girl, and Stella, Lucasta, Ailsa and finally young Gillian, who share an unspoken desire to have for themselves a tranquil golden place like that in the painting.
Quintessential Forster, this is a novel about women's lives, about what it means and what it costs to be both a woman and an artist, and an unusual, compelling look at a beautiful painting and its imagined afterlife.

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What the critics say

Forster's style is easy and unpretentious. In a brief paragraph she can create a character we care about, a story we long to see resolved
- Independent on Sunday

Few authors share Margaret Forster's extraordinary ability to transform the ordinary day-to-day activities of unremarkable people into compelling fiction
- Daily Mail

[A] finely crafted novel
- Sunday Telegraph

The characters are fully developed and differentiated...there is harrowing emotional insight; it also contains elements of real comedy
- The Times

Forster-lovers will not be disappointed by her depiction of a cornered creativity and its persisting power to subvert and enchant
- Guardian

A skilful, apparently simple tale is unostentatiously styled to disguise its artificiality and this writer's artful adaption, but not contradiction, of historical facts
- Sunday Telegraph

By this author

About the Author

Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster is the author of many acclaimed novels including Is There Anything You Want?, bestselling memoirs and biographies. She is married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lives in London and the Lake District.