Desire tied up with loss, absence, longing and deceit.Īs we trace the novel's path through 17th-century Amsterdam, 1950s New York, and millennial Sydney and the events that connect Sara, Marty and Ellie, we'll discuss what this story can tell us about what how we determine what kind of life will make us happy, why we make the decisions we do, and how we respond to beauty. Desire for connection, retribution, escape. Desire half-understood, partly expressed.

It captures and reflects the desire, erotic or otherwise, of Pieter, Marty and later Ellie. But the painting ends up in the lives of Pieter de Groot and his descendant Marty. At the Edge of the Wood, an otherworldly winter landscape, is artist Sara de Vos's expression of grief for her dead daughter and a work she vows never to share with anyone. She is referring to a real-life Vermeer, but her words are no less true of the fictional painting that has shaped her life. The character of Sara is an imagined one, but she has her genesis in the fate of one or two real women and the shadowy possibilities of many more – women whose work may have been misattributed to male artists and whose names may have been obscured by the historical records.All art contains desire, art historian Ellie Shipley tells her students. Titled ' Daughters of the Guild', the essay gives some fascinating background information to the writing of this novel, discussing the art of the Dutch Golden Age and the women painters of that time and place who have been all but lost to history, and giving some insights into the creative process as Smith both imagined and experienced it in the writing of his latest novel. 'Sara de Vos is a character built out of gaps and silences,' Smith has said in an essay for the Paris Review (April 2016). The question 'What exactly is an Australian writer?' has popped up regularly for the last 200 years, but is getting harder and harder to answer. Despite the fact that this is his fourth novel, the fact that his previous novel was shortlisted for two major Australian literary prizes, and the fact that he is clearly a major talent, his name is largely unfamiliar to Australian readers. Australian-born Dominic Smith grew up in Sydney but has spent most of his adult life in the United States he currently lives in Austin, Texas, where he is claimed as a 'Texan writer'.

The painting of sara de vos