" A glittering, propulsive new novel . . . Few writers play as confidently with the nuts and bolts of language, and historical characters netted from the past. O'Farrell adroitly shrinks Lucrezia to her own vanishing point, even if the probable cause of the duchess's demise was a pulmonary embolism rather than poison. O'Farrell's creative license beautifully frames the chasms that open up between husband and wife, implicating an institution that has galvanized our canonical writers, including the Victorian poet Robert Browning, whose dramatic monologue 'My Last Duchess' was inspired by Branzino's portrait of Lucrezia." -Oprah Daily
" O'Farrell intelligently connects Lucrezia's trapped circumstances with the art that her husband, a notable patron and collector, commissions to immortalize her . . . There is a blinding power to the heightened, almost fetishistic beauty of Renaissance art, this novel suggests as it portrays a world of far greater brutality and fierceness." - Wall Street Journal
" [O'Farrell] has spun pure gold out of this tragic history . . . The Marriage Portrait builds a rich interior world while vividly re creating an era, in this case the Italian Renaissance, a period overflowing with intrigue and pomp, rustling heavy fabrics and glowing frescoes, blood and lust and the desire for power." -Minneapolis Star Tribune
" This duchess certainly looks and sounds and feels as if she were alive . . . O'Farrell has an uncanny ability to put us in Lucrezia's very unusual shoes. One experiences, viscerally, Lucrezia's exhaustion and terror when she is abandoned in a strange place a few hours after her marriage, her giddy excitement and expansive feeling of freedom in the early days of her marriage, her revulsion and fear as her husband's 'fury and contempt' emerge . . . The final twist is so unexpected and so gorgeously executed that it brought this reader to tears. With it, O'Farrell demonstrates fiction's ability to offer counter narratives to those of received history, to open before us imaginative abundance and a tremulous sense of possibility." -The Boston Globe
" O'Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave this story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station . . . You may know the history, and you may think you know what's coming, but don't be so sure. O'Farrell and Lucrezia, with her 'crystalline, righteous anger,' will always be one step ahead of you.. . . O'Farrell [is] one of the most exciting novelists alive." -The Washington Post
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