Beauty does that. Especially when it sneaks up on you. Sensible people, practical people, serious people have little use for Beauty. It's a distraction. It enlarges your senses. Colours suddenly become hypnotic. Sounds that you would ordinarily screen out advance to the front of your consciousness.

A rich, moving, and satisfying tale of a woman engaged at last with the great mysteries of love and life. Beautifully wrought and impressively wise. Tell us about your research into the Apocrypha, the Middle East of ancient times, and Venice. Can we look forward to reading more about these topics in upcoming books? Miss Julia Garnet, spinster and virgin, travels to Venice after the death of her friend Harriet. She discovers more than solace there, something more akin to an awakening. It’s a beautiful premise and is artfully executed, and Venice is the ideal, sumptuous setting for this intriguing mix of stories that Julia’s tale entwines with – my favourite character is the wise and delightful Monsignore Giuseppe, whose presence brings a kindness and affability to the story which I really loved, but while some of the characters fall flat, Julia’s relationship with Venice itself (and the angel Raphael) never does. It is a book that tries to do a lot, but that’s okay because it largely succeeds. She makes new friends, and meets new, interesting people, including a young man and woman, twins, who are restoring a series of panels depicting the tale of Tobias and the Angel, a story which is told in the Apocrypha, and which holds a strange fascination for Julia.What was the germ for Julia Garnet’s story? What is it that drew you to Venice and the Book of Tobit as the setting and occasion for your novel? Her father was a committed supporter of Irish republicanism, and her first name 'Salley' is spelled with an 'e' because it is the Irish for ' willow' (cognate with Latin: salix, salicis), as in the W B Yeats poem, " Down by the Salley Gardens", a favourite of her parents. [ citation needed] The greatest wisdoms are not those which are written down but those which are passed between human beings who understand each other….

As Venice works it’s magic on Miss Garnet, she falls in love......with Venice, with its splendid buildings and waterways, with her new life, and, with an enigmatic man she meets by chance.....and with an Angel....

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I read this novel when it was first published. That was in the year 2000! This is a novel that has really withstood the test of time and it is a book I often suggest to people who are off to Venice. Reading it offers an even greater cinematic experience of the city (is that even possible?). It is a gentle story, told with charm and detail, that carries the reader along at a thoughtful pace. This is the story of Julia, now in retirement, in many ways an unremarkable woman – and yet. She chooses to spend 6 months in Venice, exploring the city and its treasures, gaining a variety of friendships and experiences. As the time passes, she learns to re-evaluate some of her core beliefs and to trawl her deeper soul in quiet contemplation. Both Julia and Harriet were dutifully pro-labour, even deriving a sense of moral superiority - or at least moral purity - from the connection. But beneath the austere surface, Julia Garnet was hungry for adventure, for travel, and, most unexpectedly, for beauty, the latter having been limited to admiring the inherent loveliness of flowers in other people's gardens. Julia was starved for joy and she was shrinking into oblivion when her housemate's sudden death changed everything and brought Julia face to face with with her surprising destiny. Her retirement, the loss of a friend, and an unexpected legacy have a polarising effect on her, and quite out of character, she decides to spend six months in Venice, renting a small apartment in this beautiful city.

We cannot commission desire,” Julia reflects at one point, referring not only to herself but also to Carlo. To what degree, and on what grounds, does Julia come to feel a sense of solidarity with Carlo, of all people? Explain. By the time she was at university in the early 1970s she said she had, "crushingly high standards" in writing. "The people I loved were Jane Austen, Conrad, James and Dostoevsky. I felt you had to be in that sort of range. I couldn't just write any old book, so I thought about writing as something separate to earning a living." How do you feel about the popular critical and commercial practice today of sorting contemporary novels into tidy categories: women’s fiction, men’s fiction, gay fiction, romantic comedy, literary fiction, etc.? To what categories have you most often found Miss Garnet’s Angel assigned? In the end, I think this is someone who actually does write better than Dan Brown trying to write something similar to The da Vinci Code or such, but running up against the same problems: the straining of credulity chief among them. While I welcome this in cheezy mystery fiction, I expect something better from this sort of book.Standing with Vera before The Last Judgement at the Tintoretto church, Julia wonders, “What did it mean to be weighed in a balance and found wanting?” And later, in her journal, she writes, “What does my life really amount to?” How are these questions ultimately resolved? Describe the change Julia Garnet undergoes over the course of her stay in Venice. What effects do the events and discoveries of her visit have on her sense of self, as a communist grounded in atheism and as a woman generally wary of life’s “irrational” realms, whether romantic, mystical, or spiritual? What —and who —are the catalysts for this change? A projected non-fiction book about The Book of Common Prayer and entitled Sweet and Comfortable Words was never published.

Miss Garnet, ein ältliches, frisch pensioniertes Fräulein und ehemalige Lehrerin begibt sich für ein halbes Jahr nach Venedig, um die dortigen Kirchen und Kunstschätze zu studieren. Auf dieser Reise findet und verliert sie eine Liebe, findet Freunde und verliert sich seltsam tief in religiösen Mythen. A nicely told and rather quiet story, that did not really meet my interests, but probably very nice for the right target group.The habits of a lifetime are not easy to break and Julia seeks out a fairly basic lodging except for one detail: the balcony that presents to her view the glory of Venice's architecture and that indescribable light that so intrigued artists from da Vinci to Canaletto and beyond. From her tiny perch above the teeming canals, Julia Garnet will dive into a life she could not have imagined. Friends had been few and somewhat cold-blooded in England but from her first day in Venice Julia seemed to attract an amazing number of interesting and talented people and for possibly the first time in her life, she fell in love. Not once but twice. And one of the objects her love was - of all things - an Angel. An Archangel to be more precise. A beautiful androgynous Archangel whose presence seemed to follow her around the floating city. His name was Raphael. I’ve honestly lost count of how many times I’ve read this book..four times, maybe five.....there is something about it that appeals to me, and I list it among my all time favourites. One of a quartet of "London" novels republished by Harvill, Green's book is more curiosity than essential read. It is set during the Blitz and centres on Richard Roe, a diffident man who comes to London from a well-heeled country estate to volunteer for the Auxiliary Fire Service. Roe, the archetypal, tight-lipped English widower, who "wished that he had never made a point of not kissing Christopher", his five-year-old son, is contrasted with the professional fireman, Pye. Neither the war as whole, nor even the Blitz, impinges much on the narrative - both men are frighteningly at sea in personal emotional anguish - but fear hangs like a pall over this sombre novel. Near the end of the novel, Julia encounters a young woman on a train named Saskia. As they talk, Julia experiences “the strangest sensation.” And later, Julia reflects that “the meeting had crystallized something for her.” What has happened here? What issues of identification, regret, and mutual recognition might Julia be coming to terms with in this scene? Hemon was born in Bosnia, went to the US in 1991, and taught himself to write in English. When fiction crosses the Danube, critics scratching for a suitable adjective to describe Eastern European otherness go for "Nabokovian" or hint at kinship with Kundera. Hemon gets compared to both on the cover of his first collection of short stories. As he writes in artifice-rich prose about loss, exile, and the peculiar tangles of Balkan history (Tito, Stalin and Archduke Ferdinand), those comparisons make sense. He excels at that superficially unserious style that communism bred, but some may find his stylistic gymnastics and clotted prose unsettling.