Masterpiece

The new novel from the Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Impossibility of Love and The Baroness. Tuscany, 1470**:** in the bright light of a new day, an artist is lying awake. He is thinking about a new painting, a fresco, that will shape his future, and echo down the centuries. In the 1920s, a member of the Bloomsbury Group writes to her secret lover about a painting that has changed how she thinks about her life, certain it will do the same to him. As the Second World War draws to a close, a young British captain is ordered to bomb a Tuscan hill town. Inside it hangs a painting he believes is the greatest ever made. To save it, he must defy orders thereby risking his career and even his freedom. 2014: A young conservator arrives in Sansepolcro to work on one of the masterpieces of the Renaissance: Piero della Francesca's The Resurrection. Her instructions are to preserve, stabilise, interfere as little as possible; simple enough, until she meets a man who resists all such rules, and finds that restraint, in work as in life, is harder than it looks. Spanning more than five centuries, and drawing on original unpublished diaries and letters of the period, this is a story of art and war, illicit passion and personal heroism, and of the extraordinary lives bound up with the creation and survival of a single, transcendent work of art - a masterpiece. '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 'Masterpiece weaves history, art, war and love into a page-turning, unforgettable story.' 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 © Hannah Rothschild 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027