Still Life - Sarah Winman

Set across four decades, from the 1940s to the early 80s, Still Life is a beautiful, big-hearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood... and the ghost of E.M. Forster. By the bestselling, prize-winning author of When God was a Rabbit and Tin Man It's 1944 and in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as the Allied troops advance and bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening together. Ulysses Temper is a young British solider and one-time globe-maker, Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and relive her memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view. These two unlikely people find kindred spirits in each other and Evelyn's talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses mind that will shape the trajectory of his life - and of those who love him - for the next four decades. Moving from the Tuscan Hills, to the smog of the East End and the piazzas of Florence, Still Life is a sweeping, mischievous and richly peopled novel about beauty, love and fate. It's a story of the things that make life worth living, and the things we're prepared to die for.