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  • Published: 2 February 2027
  • ISBN: 9781529154696
  • Imprint: Hutchinson Heinemann
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $34.99
Categories:

Masterpiece




A story of art and war, illicit passion and personal heroism, and of four people whose lives are bound together by a single work of art

TUSCANY, 1470: in the bright light of a new day, an artist lies awake, imagining a fresco that will shape his future and echo down the centuries.

1922: A member of the Bloomsbury Group writes to her secret lover about a painting that changed her life; she believes it will change his too.

1944: A British army captain is ordered to bomb a Tuscan hill town. Inside it hangs a painting said to be the greatest ever made. To save it, he must disobey orders, risking his career and even his freedom.

2014: A young conservator arrives in Sansepolcro to restore Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection, and discovers she must preserve not only the painting but also the stories of those who saved it.

Drawing on real letters and unpublished diaries, this is the true story of four people who risked love and even their lives for one great masterpiece.

  • Published: 2 February 2027
  • ISBN: 9781529154696
  • Imprint: Hutchinson Heinemann
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $34.99
Categories:

About the author

Hannah Rothschild

Hannah Rothschild was the first woman to Chair the board of London’s National Gallery. She is the author of an acclaimed biography, The Baroness, and three novels, including The Improbability of Love, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, was a Waterstones Book of the Year, and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. Drawing on her extensive knowledge, she has spent seven years researching unpublished diaries, letters, photograph albums and papers to tell this remarkable story. Masterpiece is the book she feels she has always been meant to write.

Praise for Masterpiece

Masterpiece is just wonderful. There's a generosity and scope to this novel that expands the heart and fills the mind. It's one of those books that you can't wait to talk about with friends. Three very different stories weave their way through three centuries, each one showing that art and love - and the courage to be different - really matter. The characters crackle on the page and take up residence in your head. It's dextrous, vivid and wise: a tonic and a celebration. My book of the year.

Cressida Connolly

I love Rothschild's cleverness, wit and heart, and this is the book she was born to write.

Rosie Boycott

Masterpiece is Hannah Rothschild’s best novel by far. Brilliantly researched, it is a multi-period story which is both moving and convincing

Antony Beevor

What gives the novel its power is the human depth beneath the art. Rothschild is acutely attentive to the fragile, often contradictory inner lives of her characters—ambition braided with vulnerability, intellect shadowed by grief, love constrained by invidious laws. Even as the narrative delves into the rarefied world of art, it never loses sight of the emotional stakes that make that world matter. Masterpiece is also a fast-paced, addictive page-turner, as gripping as the finest whodunnit

Geordie Greig

An exquisitely unfolding story of love and art. Masterful and gripping

Esther Freud

A marvellous exploration of what art means to the individual, how it brings us together and how it helps us to communicate -across culture, time and experience -and to find our shared humanity. Rich and immersive: I loved it.

Joanne Harris

Emotionally consuming and beautifully told, this generation spanning story of love, creativity, art and integrity had me spellbound. A truly gorgeous novel

Jennie Godfrey

Darting through history and across Europe, interlacing stories, always with a vivid sense of the present, this is a vastly enjoyable novel which will appeal to everybody who has ever looked at a picture and fallen in love with it. Hannah Rothschild proves herself a natural and addictive novelist

Andrew Marr

A captivating charming heartbreaking novel that celebrates a gorgeous painting, a series of secret love affairs and the joy and transience of life itself, spanning history from the fifteen century to today with exquisite poignancy and delicious storytelling

Simon Sebag Montefiore

An enthralling meditation on the nature of art and the power of love across several centuries, superbly researched and full of memorable characters

Anthony Horowitz

Powerful and passionate, Masterpiece is a ravishing story about buried love and the art that might save us. It unfolds layer by layer, across generations and centuries, with the precision and scale of the great painting at its heart. I loved it

Rachel Joyce