Still Life

Tuscany, 1944: as Allied troops advance and bombs sink villages, young English soldier Ulysses Temper finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian intent on salvaging paintings from the ruins. In each other they find a kindred spirit amid the rubble of war, and that meeting sets a course that will shape Ulysses’s life for four decades. Back in London, Ulysses reimmerses himself in his crew at The Stoat and Parot—a motley mix of pub crawlers and eccentrics—yet carries with him his Italian evocations. When an unexpected inheritance draws him back to the Tuscan hills, the novel follows how love, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster bind a group of individuals into an enduring family.