About this item
A sorcerer in wax. A fugitive. Haunted by a past he cannot escape. Threatened by a future he cannot imagine. Zummo, a Sicilian sculptor, is summoned by Cosimo III to join the Medici court. Late seventeenth-century Florence is a hotbed of repression and hypocrisy. All forms of pleasure are brutally punished, and the Grand Duke himself, a man for whom marriage has been an exquisite torture, hides his pain beneath a show of excessive piety. The Grand Duke asks Zummo to produce a life-size woman out of wax, an antidote to the French wife who made him suffer so. As Zummo wrestles with this unique commission, he falls under the spell of a woman whose elusiveness mirrors his own, but whose secrets are far more explosive. Lurking in the wings is the poisonous Dominican priest, Stufa, who has it within his power to destroy Zummos livelihood, if not his life.
About the Author
Rupert Thomson is the author of thirteen critically acclaimed novels, including 'The Insult', which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and chosen by David Bowie as one of the 100 Must-Read Books of All Time, 'The Book of Revelation', which was made into a feature film by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos, and 'Death of a Murderer', which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize. In 2010 he ventured into non-fiction with 'This Party's Got to Stop'. Described by Robert Macfarlane as "completely brilliant" and by Jackie Kay as "a riot, and heartbreakingly sad", Thomson's memoir went on to win the Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Book of the Year. A new novel, 'Katherine Carlyle', came out in 2015, and received praise from, among others, James Salter, Lionel Shriver, Jonathan Lethem, Deborah Moggach, Richard Flanagan, Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry, Samantha Morton, Rebecca Mead, and KT Tunstall. Philip Pullman called it "completely unexpected and brilliantly done" and "the strongest and most original novel I have read it a very long time." In 2018 he published 'Never Anyone But You', a novel based on the true story of two extraordinary French women who became lovers during the early years of the twentieth century and risked their lives by trying to undermine the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two. 'Never Anyone But You' was chosen as a Book of the Year in the Guardian and the Observer. Sarah Waters had this to say: 'Never Anyone But You' is "a novel of tremendous beauty...a wonderful achievement", while Alex Preston called it "gorgeous and heart-rending". A year later, 'NVK' was published under the pseudonym Temple Drake. 'NVK' was an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and was selected by the BBC as one of their Ten Books to Read in November 2019, describing the novel as "supercharged and genre-mixing". The Guardian called it "glitteringly baroque" and "urgently modern". "I don't know how Rupert Thomson does it," Philip Pullman says of Thomson's new book, 'Barcelona Dreaming'. "Each novel he writes is a new vision of a new world; he's the least predictable, the most surprising of writers." "The three stories in Barcelona Dreaming are connected by ingeniously created threads," says Colm Toibin, "but also by a tone that is ironic, observant, alert to the complexity of the characters' motives and desires", while Andrea Wulf calls it "elegant and electrifying". 'Barcelona Dreaming' will be published in June 2021. Rupert Thomson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has contributed to the Financial Times, Granta, the Guardian, the Independent, and the London Review of Books. He has lived in many cities around the world, including Athens, Berlin, Amsterdam, New
