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Summary
Summary
Across three continents and four hundred years, Dominic Smith has spun a stunning tale of forgeries and deaths, deception and love to reveal the lasting legacy of a fateful brush stroke. Akin to the page-turning greats like Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Goldfinch, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is held together by the gravitas of a single painting to tell the story of two women¿their mistakes and love affairs, their devotion to art and their struggles to thrive in a male dominated profession. When Ellie Shipley, a young art student, agrees to copy the seventeenth century painting, ¿At the Edge of a Wood,¿ her future becomes irrevocably entangled with Sara de Vos, the artist whose work she forged. Weaving together the past and present lives of Sara and Ellie and their two paintings, Smith brilliantly transports readers from 1950s New York - the mahogany walls of Upper West side apartments and the grit of Brooklyn, to the moody Dutch countryside of the 1600s to Sydney Australia¿s sun-soaked harbor in 2000.
Author Notes
Dominic Smith grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas.
Smith earned an MFA in writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. His writing has been nominate for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly.
Dominic's writing has received several awards including the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, and the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize. His debut novel The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. It also received the Steven Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. Dominic's second novel, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, was optioned for a film by Southpaw Entertainment. His third novel-Bright and Distant Shores was published in 2011 and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year and the Vance Palmer Prize, two of Australia's foremost literary awards. His most recent book is The Last Painting of Sara De Vos (2016). It won the 2017 2017 Indie Book Award for Fiction.
Dominic serves as a faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and has taught recently at the University of Texas at Austin and Southern Methodist University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Bookseller Publisher Review
It's the late 1950s and a young Australian post-grad student, Ellie Shipley, agrees to make a copy of a little known work by the 17th-century Dutch painter Sara De Vos. Titled 'At the Edge of the Wood', it has been in the family of New York lawyer Marty De Groot for hundreds of years. Sara's copy is almost perfect and in fact it's months before Marty realises that his original has been replaced by a fake. Forty years later, Ellie Shipley is a professor of fine arts at Sydney University, and curator of an exhibition of Dutch female painters at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. One of the works she has selected for showing is 'At the Edge of the Wood'. However, there's a slight problem as the gallery has been offered two paintings and one of them has to be Ellie's fake. With great skill, Smith weaves three interconnecting stories of Sara De Vos, the young Ellie and her final confrontation with her past in Sydney. While there are a few gaps in the story, it's a wonderful narrative masterfully told and absolutely compelling. It will appeal to a wide range of readers, accessible yet complex in the manner of Geraldine Brooks or Anthony Doerr. I predict it will be one of the big books for 2016. Mark Rubbo is the managing director of Readings
New York Review of Books Review
THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, by Dominic Smith. (Picador, $16.) A 17th-century Dutch painting and a forgery of it kick off a highbrow mystery. After the painting is stolen from Marty de Groot, whose family had owned it for generations, Marty's streak of bad luck comes to an end. Years later, the hidden commonalities between him, the artist - the only female painter in a Dutch guild at the time - and the painting's forger come into full view. WHITE TRASH: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg. (Penguin, $17.) This masterly cultural history traces the United States' changing relationship to white poverty - from Britain's desire to banish its undesirable citizens to North America, to the stigmas and epithets attached to the underclass, to racial anxieties about becoming a "mongrel" nation. EVERYONE BRAVE IS FORGIVEN, by Chris Cleave. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) In 1939 London, Mary North is given a teaching job just as the city's students are evacuated, leaving behind only those who are mentally impaired, disabled or black. Cleave drew upon his grandparents' correspondence for his novel, which our reviewer, Michael Callahan, praised for its "ability to stay small and quiet against the raging tableau of war." OPERATION THUNDERBOLT: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport, the Most Audacious Hostage Rescue Mission in History, by Saul David. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) In 1976, hijackers forced the pilot of an Air France flight en route from Tel Aviv to Paris to land in Entebbe, Uganda, and took the plane's passengers hostage. David recounts the episode in thrilling, minute-by-minute detail, with attention to the masterminds behind the hijacking and the Israeli government's decision to carry out the dangerous rescue mission. THE SUN IN YOUR EYES, by Deborah Shapiro. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $14.99.) It's been 10 years since Viv and Lee, the daughter of a musician who died when she was a child, lived together in college, and nearly three since Lee all but dropped from view. But when she suddenly appears, asking Viv to join her on a quest to recover her father's unfinished album, the trip offers both women a chance at closure. THE RETURN: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, by Hisham Matar. (Random House, $17.) Matar's father, a prominent Libyan dissident, disappeared into a notorious regime prison in 1990; his fate remains unknown. This memoir, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, examines the grief of a family left in the dark, with meditations on dictatorship and art's capacity to console.
