Venus, Vanishing

A Novel

De: Rebecca Birrell

Narrado por: Lydia Wilson

“A richly textured, gorgeously written debut that I couldn’t put down.”
—Joanna Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Whalebone Theatre

The Safekeep meets Portrait of a Lady on Fire in a gripping debut following a young Jewish painter in 1930s Berlin whose work is tampered with and exhibited under a man’s name, reckoning with art forgery, desire, suspicion, and resistance

In raucous 1928 Berlin, Hannah Sherman has deviated from the traditional narrative arc of a woman’s life. After rejecting an arranged marriage, she leaves home to join the city’s underground art scene, reveling in its clubs and galleries with newfound friends and lovers. Working as a tailor while studying art in every spare moment, Hannah comes to know women and their bodies, first with measuring tape and silk, and later through sensuous layers of paint.

Hannah feels like she can finally call herself an artist when a wealthy female art collector, commissions her to make an elaborate series of nude portraits. But after Hannah finishes the acclaimed Venus paintings, she discovers that her work is being tampered with and exhibited under a man’s name. When lines between artist and muse are crossed in an intoxicating but perilous affair, Hannah transforms her art into an act of revenge, finding herself caught up in a devastating game of survival.

Laced with queer desire and life-threatening secrets, Venus, Vanishing pulses with hedonism and danger as history comes to Hannah’s door, offering a textured and sweeping counter-narrative of creativity, resistance, and survival.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Venus, Vanishing is a gripping, intimate exploration of a young woman artist coming of age in pre-war Berlin. Rebecca Birrell recreates this lost world beautifully, building up its layers as carefully as a painter: its nightclub dancers and nosy landladies, its bold activists and ambitious politicians. Her protagonist Hannah finds in art a space to explore her desires, but in 1930s Germany, that seductive space is becoming increasingly dangerous. Art can both reveal and conceal secrets—and the tangled relationship between artist and muse can have lethal consequences. This is a richly textured, gorgeously written debut that I couldn’t put down.”
—Joanna Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Whalebone Theatre

“This extraordinary book holds a whole world, both deeply researched and deeply felt, brought to vivid life before our eyes. Rebecca Birrell writes her way into each scene so piercingly, steering readers through heart-quickening moments of peril and courage, of desire and risk. This is the rare sort of book that brings the past back to trembling life and alerts the reader to the shadows it casts in our present moment. Venus, Vanishing moved me deeply; I didn't want it to end.”
–Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat

“It is rare for a novel to hold so much beauty and life alongside such destruction, loss and pain, and even rarer for none of these to diminish the force of the other. This book offers us a vision of art against evil, of the endurance of love, ambition and vitality amidst the worst of atrocities and betrayal. Rebecca Birrell’s writing offers us a world to live in and to hope from, a new counter-narrative of survival and renewal. This is a radiant, bold, exquisite novel—inspiring, moving and ultimately consoling.”
—Megan Hunter, author of Days of Light