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Art in Fiction A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words
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The Art Forger
by Barbara A. Shapiro
An artist whose reputation has been tarnished stumbles on a piece of art that disappeared twenty-five years ago and agrees to forge it for a gallery owner, until she realizes that the art she is forging may itself be a forgery.
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An Artist of the Floating World
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Drifting without honor in Japan's post-World War II society, which indicts him for its defeat and reviles him for his esthetics, aging painter Masuji Ono recalls the events of his life.
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The Black Painting
by Neil Olson
Four adult cousins from a family that has been estranged for decades amid suspicions regarding the theft of a cursed Goya painting gather at the mansion of their grandfather, who is found murdered.
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The Blue Guitar
by John Banville
Oliver Otway Orme, a semi-famous artist and petty thief, despairing of limits in his talents, flees when his latest theft is discovered and sequesters himself in his childhood home, where he struggles to understand how he reached his current state.
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Dancing with the Tiger
by Lili Wright
When 30-year-old Anna Ramsey learns that a meth-addicted looter has dug up what might be the funerary mask of Montezuma, she books the next flight to Oaxaca. Determined to redeem her father, a discredited art collector, and to one-up her unfaithful fiance, a museum curator, Anna hurls herself headlong into Mexico's underground art world. But others are chasing the treasure as well.
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The End of Temperance Dare
by Wendy Webb
Eleanor Harper, a former crime reporter and the new director of an artists' retreat at Cliffside Manor, realizes that she can't escape the house's dark past as a tuberculosis sanatorium, and that the previous director may have chosen her group of artists for a sinister reason.
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The Fifth Avenue Artists Society
by Joy Callaway
Four artistic sisters on the outskirts of Gilded Age New York high society are swept up by the eldest sister's heartbroken efforts to achieve literary success against a backdrop of two suitors from very different walks of life.
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From this moment
by Elizabeth Camden
Stella West's artistic talent made her the toast of London, but when her beloved sister dies under mysterious circumstances, she abandons everything, heads for Boston, and tries to pierce the ring of secrecy surrounding her sister's death. When she meets Romulus White, a publisher with innumerable connections, she decides he could be a valuable ally. He decides to help her as a means to induce her to create art for his magazine. Neither one is prepared for the sparks that fly, and Romulus begins to wonder whether helping Stella solve the mystery of her sister's death is worth the risk to his publishing empire.
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Girl with a Pearl Earring
by Tracy Chevalier
A poor seventeenth-century servant girl knows her place in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer, but when he begins to paint her, nasty whispers and rumors circulate throughout the town.
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The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
Taken in by a wealthy family friend after surviving an accident that killed his mother, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker tries to adjust to life on Park Avenue in this new novel by the author of The Secret History.
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The Heist
by Daniel Silva
Art restorer and occasional spy Gabriel Allon hunts for a stolen Caravaggio masterpiece, traveling from Marseilles and Corsica, to Paris and Geneva, and, finally, to Austria, where a dangerous man guards the ill-gotten wealth of a brutal dictator.
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Heretics
by Leonardo Padura
When his family’s treasure, a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ that disappeared 70 years earlier, reappears in an auction house in London, the son of Cuban refugees hires a down-on-his-luck private detective and together they navigate a web of deception and violence in the morally complex city of Havana to find the truth.
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A House Among the Trees
by Julia Glass
When a revered children's book author dies accidentally and leaves everything to his trusted assistant, the assistant reflects on their long bond and the complicated aspects of her late employer's life and final wishes. By the National Book Award-winning author of Three Junes.
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How To Be Both
by Ali Smith
Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, a lively story about the versatility of art is presented as a genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and tales from the perspectives of a renaissance artist, the offspring of a 1960s parent and others.
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The Italian teacher
by Tom Rachman
An Italian youth raised to revere the genius artist father who abandoned their family strives to become worthy of his father's attentions through a series of failed career pursuits before he hatches a scheme to secure his father's legacy. By the best-selling author of The Imperfectionists.
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The Last Painting of Sara De Vos
by Dominic Smith
Half a century after reluctantly painting a forgery of the only surviving landscape by a 17th-century female Dutch master, Sara curates an exhibit of women Dutch painters and risks exposure when both the original and her forgery arrive. By the award-winning author of The Beautiful Miscellaneous.
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The Library of Light and Shadow
by M. J. Rose
Sought by society patrons who admire her ability to create stunning "shadow portraits" revealing her subjects' most scandalous secrets, a mystical artist in 1925 Manhattan renounces her gift in the wake of a tragedy and flees to southern France, where she confronts toxic people from her past.
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Lisette's List
by Susan Vreeland
A tale centered on the lives of Provence-inspired master artists follows the experiences of an exiled young Parisian who cares for her husband's ailing grandfather during the Vichy regime and rediscovers love through the master works of Cezanne, Pissarro, Chagall and Picasso. By the best-selling author of The Girl in Hyacinth Blue.
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Maestra
by Lisa Hilton
By day, Judith Rashleigh is a put-upon assistant at a prestigious London art house. By night, she's a hostess at one of the capital's notorious champagne bars. Desperate to make something of herself, Judith knows she has to play the game. But when Judith is fired for uncovering a dark secret at the heart of the art world--and her honest efforts at a better life are destroyed--she turns to a long-neglected friend.
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The Masterpiece
by Francine Rivers
A successful Los Angeles artist hides behind a veneer of fame his secret activities as an anonymous graffiti artist, an alter ego that his new personal assistant fears could destroy his career before they bond over their mutually tragic pasts in ways that transform their relationship and lives.
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The Miniaturist
by Jessie Burton
Engaging the services of a miniaturist to furnish a cabinet-sized replica of her new home, 18-year-old Nella Oortman, the wife of an illustrious merchant trader, soon discovers that the artist's tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in eerie and unexpected ways.
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Mr. Mac and Me
by Esther Freud
A tale inspired by the life of Scottish artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh follows the early 20th-century friendship between an English coast pub owner's son and an enigmatic architect on the eve of World War I.
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The Muse
by Jessie Burton
A Caribbean immigrant in 1960s London and a bohemian woman in 1930s Spain are bound together by a painting rumored to be the work of a genius artist and the mystery surrounding his death.
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My Name Is Red
by Orhan Pamuk
A furor erupts when the Sultan hires a group of artists, under the direction of Master Uncle, to illuminate a great book in the European style to celebrate his reign at a time in which all figurative art is considered Islamic heresy, but the situation becomes worse when one of the miniaturists vanishes, in a mystery set against the backdrop of religious repression in sixteenth-century Istanbul.
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The Other Alcott
by Elise Hooper
A tale inspired by the life of Louisa May Alcott's youngest sister finds young May longing to study art outside of the confines of her Concord home before turning down a marriage proposal and pursuing an identity in contrast to the spoiled and worldly character of Amy in her sister's famed novel.
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The Paris Secret
by Karen Swan
While assessing objects d’art in a Paris apartment that has been abandoned since WWII, high-powered fine art agent Flora Sykes is thrown into the glamorous world of the Vermeils family until she makes a discovery that brings about scandal and places her in the eye of a storm that carries her from London to the glittering coast of Provence.
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A Piece of the World
by Christina Baker Kline
Imagines the life story of Christina Olson, the subject of Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World," describing the simple life she led on a remote Maine farm, her complicated relationship with her family, and the illness that incapacitated her.
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Promise Not to Tell
by Jayne Ann Krentz
Having spent years battling demons stemming from her childhood in a cult and a fire that ended her mother's life, a Seattle gallery owner is devastated when one of her artists commits suicide after sending her a mysterious picture that compels her to team up with a fellow cult survivor, a private investigator who uncovers the work of a determined killer.
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Roses and Rot
by Kat Howard
Two sisters obsessed with tragic fairy tales and getting their hearts’ desires discover that not everything is quite as it seems when they are both accepted into an elite, post-graduate arts program that eventually threatens to pit them against each other.
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The Scribe of Siena
by Melodie Winawer
Taking an unexpected trip to a Tuscan city to settle her brother's estate, a grieving neurosurgeon discovers the journals and paintings of a 14th-century artist before finding herself transported through time to the artist's world just prior to the outbreak of a devastating plague.
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Stolen Beauty
by Laurie Lico Albanese
From the dawn of the twentieth century to the devastation of World War II, this exhilarating novel of love, war, art, and family gives voice to two extraordinary women and brings to life the true story behind the creation and near destruction of Gustav Klimt’s most remarkable paintings.
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The Strays
by Emily Bitto
On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends one of the daughters of infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham. He and his wife are trying to escape the stifling conservatism of 1930s Australia by inviting other like-minded artists to live and work at their family home. Lily becomes infatuated with this wild, makeshift family and longs to truly be part of it. As the years pass, Lily observes the way the lives of these artists come to reflect the same themes as their art: Faustian bargains and spectacular falls from grace.
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The Sunlit Night
by Rebecca Dinerstein
In the barren landscape of the Far North, under the ever-present midnight sun, Frances, who lives in an isolated artist colony, and Yasha, who arrives from Brooklyn to fulfill his beloved father's last wish, form a bond that offers them solace amidst great uncertainty.
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This Is How It Begins
by Joan Dempsey
In 2009, eighty-five-year-old art professor Ludka Zeilonka gets drawn into a political firestorm when her grandson, Tommy, is among a group of gay Massachusetts teachers fired for allegedly discriminating against Christian kids in high school classrooms. The ensuing battle to reinstate the teachers raises the specter of Ludka's World War II past—a past she's spent a lifetime trying to forget. As Ludka's esteemed political family defends Tommy under increasingly vicious conditions, a stranger with connections to Ludka's past shows up and threatens to expose her for illegally hoarding a valuable painting presumed stolen by the Nazis. Only one other person knew about the painting—a man she's been trying to find for sixty years.
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Tiffany Girl
by Deeanne Gist
When a glassworker strike threatens the completion of Louis Tiffany's chapel in time for the 1893 Worlds Fair, he turns to Flossie Jayne and other female students at the Art Students League of New York for help in completing it.
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A Trick of the Light
by Louise Penny
Investigating a murder at a solo artist's Quebec village home, Chief Inspector Gamache and his team encounter deceptive nuances in the art world that distort every clue they find with tales of duality and broken hearts.
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Tuesday Nights in 1980
by Molly Prentiss
An evocative, synesthetic art critic and an exiled Argentinian painter on the run from his country's violence are brought together by respective tragedies, a small-town beauty and a mysterious orphan boy who helps them rediscover what they have lost.
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Tulip Fever
by Deborah Moggach
In Amsterdam in the 1630s, Sophia, the young wife of merchant Cornelis Sandvoort, escapes her stifling marriage to a wealthy older man into the arms of the artist who is hired to paint their portrait.
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War and turpentine
by Stefan Hertmans
A Flemish man draws on his grandfather's journals to piece together the story of the elder's experiences as an artist, soldier, disappointed lover, family man, and survivor of World War I.
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Cedar Mill Community Libraries 12505 NW Cornell Road Suite 13 Portland, Oregon 97229 503-644-0043library.cedarmill.org/
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