Muse
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Born on the street of the clothdyers in 14th-century Avignon, Solange has the gift of clairvoyance. She is orphaned at age five and taken in by Benedictine nuns who think that she is destined to be a saint. At fifteen, she evades her destiny by seeking her fortune as a Benedictine scribe in a city now bursting with goldsmiths, bankers, clerics, and harlots. In this extraordinary time known as the Babylonian captivity, Solange falls in love with the poet Petrarch and becomes entangled in a love triangle with Laura, the woman he worships from afar. Discarded by her lover, and blacklisted as a scribe because she is a femme sole, Solange sets out to transform herself into one of Avignon’s spectacular courtesans. When her gift for prophecy catches the Pope’s ear, Solange becomes Clement VI’s mistress and confidante. He passes her off as his “niece” in the most celebrated court in Europe, a salon for the artists, musicians, and intellectuals who are the avant-guard of the Renaissance. Drawn into intrigues in the papal palace, Solange is vilified by the Italians who, led by their poet-laureate, Petrarch, are trying to compel the Pope to leave this Babylon and return to Rome. Then an eclipse of the moon darkens the sky, warning of divine wrath for the excesses of the court. The plague follows, cleansing Avignon by killing one-third of its population, and Solange is driven, once again, to reinvent herself and fight against a final, mortal conspiracy to force her to embrace her destiny as a harlot saint.
“Novik’s extraordinary debut novel Conceit . . . is as delightful as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and as erudite and readable as A.S. Byatt’s Possession.” —Quill & Quire, starred review “A magnificent novel of 17th-century London. . . . Conceit is a mind-expanding creation of a distant world in often-exhilarating detail, seen, heard, felt, smelled and tasted. . . . Reading Conceit is like settling into a multi-course feast that shifts your ideas of food, of the wonders that art can conjure from the staples of life. . . . Buy the book. Find a free weekend and a quiet place. . . . Recall what it means to know a world through the surface of a page, created in the words of a gifted stranger, made uniquely yours by your own storehouse of experience and the mystery of your subconscious.” —The Globe and Mail “Fans of novels like A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring will enjoy Novik’s perspective on one of the great figures of English literature.” —Vancouver Sun “Few novels truly deserve the description ‘rollicking’ in the way Mary Novik’s Conceit does. A hearty, boiling stew of a novel, served up in rich old-fashioned story-telling. Novik lures her readers into the streets of a bawdy seventeenth-century London with a nudge and a wink and keeps them there with her infectious love of detail and character. A raunchy, hugely entertaining read that will leave you at once satiated and hungry for more.” —Gail Anderson-Dargatz, author of The Cure for Death by Lightning “In this gorgeous, startling, deeply moving novel about the family of the poet John Donne, the mind is shown to be one of the body’s most erogenous zones. A feast, a pageant, a seduction of words.” —Thomas Wharton, author of Icefields “Read Conceit not for its foods and flowers and silks and seductions—though these are here in all their lusty Elizabethan richness—but for its prose. . . . Novik’s writing couples the sacred and the sexy as neatly as Donne’s own.” —Annabel Lyon, author of Oxygen “This exuberant debut is so forcefully imagined, it’s hard to believe it emerged from a New World outpost like Vancouver.” —Vancouver Review
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