Light: With Monet at Giverny: A Novel / Eva Figes

This shimmering short novel gives an extraordinary portrait of a day in the life of an artist at work and at home. In prose as luminous as the colors Monet used to portray his beloved garden, Eva Figes guides us through Giverny. We get to know Monet’s family—including his daughter Germaine who frets that she will not be able to marry the man she loves and his wife who greaves for a departed child—as well as the family’s friend, the abbé, who eats and drinks with them, observing the essential faith of the painter’s art. All of the characters experience, in very different ways, the richness of the light that Monet works unceasingly to pin down in his last great paintings.