'Vivid, clever and moving: Pietà is a timely meditation on art icons, iconoclasm and the mysteries of love and time.' Gail Jones, award-winning author of Our Shadows.
Lucy's mother once warned her daughter 'to be careful what she wished for'. It is a caution that marks but rarely alters the choices the characters make in Michael Fitzgerald's novel. With lushness and tenderness, and revelation, Pietà exquisitely captures the glorious and imperfect relationships between parents and children, between art and life.
These are the last days of 1999. At St Peter's Basilica in Rome, as the world waits for the new millennium, Lucy, a young Australian woman looks up at Michelangelo's Pieta behind its pane of bullet-proof glass; a red kabbalah string circles her wrist. She has come with the mysterious parcel her recently deceased mother, who had been a nun in the 70s, asked her to bring to the box marked POSTE VATICANE.
But before Rome there is Saint-Cloud. Here, on the outskirts of Paris, Lucy works as an au pair for Jean-Claude and his wife Mathilde. When Mathilde leaves for Central Australia to research the Aboriginal artist Kumanjayi, Lucy's circle of contacts becomes smaller and strangely intimate: Jean-Claude, the baby Felix for whom she cares, and the couple's charismatic friend Sebastien, a marble restorer. Yet Lucy's homesickness for Australia and its vastness haunts her world, surfacing in the memories of her mother, the Australian garden at Empress Josephine's Malmaison, and Mathilde's letters from Alice Springs.
By:
Michael Fitzgerald Imprint: transit lounge Country of Publication: Australia Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 150mm,
ISBN:9781925760743 ISBN 10: 192576074X Pages: 256 Publication Date:01 June 2021 Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format:Paperback Publisher's Status: Active
