Tracy Chevalier

Forced to leave England and struggling with illness in the wake of a family tragedy, Quaker Honor Bright is forced to rely on strangers in the harsh landscape of 1850 Ohio and is compelled to join the Underground Railroad network to help runaway slaves escape to freedom.

Chevalier transports readers to a bygone time and place in this richly imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings. "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is the story of 16-year-old Griet, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with genius, even as she herself is immortalized in canvas and oil. History and fiction merge seamlessly in this luminous novel about artistic vision and sensual awakening.

A tour de force of history and imagination, The Lady and the Unicorn is Tracy Chevalier’s answer to the mystery behind one of the art world’s great masterpieces—a set of bewitching medieval tapestries that hangs today in the Cluny Museum in Paris. They appear to portray the seduction of a unicorn, but the story behind their making is unknown—until now.

Paris, 1490.  A shrewd French nobleman commissions six lavish

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"Burning bright" is a novel about the 18th-century English poet/painter William Blake and the children who sparked his "Songs of innocence" and "Songs of experience." In March of 1792, young Jem Kellaway and his family move from their small rural village in the Piddle Valley to the bustling city of London. Jem's father, a chairmaker, has agreed to hire on as a carpenter with Astley's Circus.

Ella Turner does her best to fit in to the small, close-knit community of Lisle-sur-Tarn. She even changes her name back to Tournier, and learns French. In vain. Isolated and lonely, she is drawn to investigate her Tournier ancestry, which leads to her encounter with the town's wolfish librarian. Isabelle du Moulin, known as Le Rousse due to her fiery red hair, is tormented and shunned in the village suspected of witchcraft and reviled for her association...

Tracy Chevalier brings Shakespeare’s Othello—a harrowing drama of jealousy and revenge—to a 1970s era elementary school playground. 
Arriving at his fifth school in as many years, diplomat’s son Osei Kokote knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day—so he’s lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding...

"In 1486, Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers in Murano, Italy. As a woman, she is not meant to blow glass-but when her father dies, she teaches herself to make beads in secret, and her work becomes the cornerstone of the Rosso family fortunes. Skipping like a stone through the centuries, we follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss, from a plague rearing its head over Venice...

Seventeen-year-old Griet must work to support her family, so she becomes a maid in the house of Johannes Vermeer, where she attracts the master painter's attention. Johannes and Griet must hide their inspiration of each other from his volatile wife Catharina, which becomes difficult when the wealthy and troublemaking Master van Ruijven commissions Vermeer to paint Griet alone.

17-year-old Griet must work to support her family, so she becomes a maid in the house of Johannes Vermeer, where she attracts the master painter's attention. He is commissioned to paint Griet, and the result is one of the greatest paintings ever created.

Writers of this collection of short stories were inspired to write about the First World War by physical objects associated with the war.