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A Novel
by Rebecca Birrell
Portrait of a Lady on Fire meets The Safekeep in this gripping debut that reckons with art forgery, desire, suspicion, and resistance.
In raucous 1928 Berlin, Hannah Sherman has deviated from the traditional narrative arc of a woman's life. After rejecting an arranged marriage, she leaves home to join the city's underground art scene, reveling in its clubs and galleries with newfound friends and lovers. Working as a tailor while studying art in every spare moment, Hannah comes to know women and their bodies, first with measuring tape and silk, and later through sensuous layers of paint.
Hannah feels like she can finally call herself an artist when a wealthy female art collector commissions her to make an elaborate series of nude portraits. But after Hannah finishes the acclaimed Venus paintings, she discovers that her work is being tampered with and exhibited under a man's name. When lines between artist and muse are crossed in an intoxicating but perilous affair, Hannah transforms her art into an act of revenge, finding herself caught up in a devastating game of survival.
Laced with queer desire and life-threatening secrets, Venus, Vanishing pulses with hedonism and danger as history comes to Hannah's door, offering a textured and sweeping counter-narrative of Jewish survival, creativity, and resistance.
"Venus, Vanishing is a gripping, intimate exploration of a young woman artist coming of age in pre-war Berlin. Rebecca Birrell recreates this lost world beautifully, building up its layers as carefully as a painter: its nightclub dancers and nosy landladies, its bold activists and ambitious politicians. Her protagonist Hannah finds in art a space to explore her desires, but in 1930s Germany, that seductive space is becoming increasingly dangerous. Art can both reveal and conceal secrets―and the tangled relationship between artist and muse can have lethal consequences. This is a richly textured, gorgeously written debut that I couldn't put down." ―Joanna Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Whalebone Theatre
"This vivid novel of 1930s Berlin explores the tangled relationship between patronage, authorship, and self-expression, asking what it means to make art in an emergency. A skillful and loving restoration of Jewish art and women's lives, of women's art and Jewish lives, of art, in other words, and life." ―Eleanor Catton, author of international bestselling Birnam Wood and Booker Prize winner The Luminaries
This information about Venus, Vanishing was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rebecca Birrell is an art historian and a Bye-Fellow in the History of Art at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. She was formerly the curator of nineteenth and twentieth century paintings and drawings at the Fitzwilliam Museum and has occupied curatorial positions at the Jewish Museum London, the Department of Prints and Drawing at the British Museum, and at the Charleston Trust. She studied English literature at University College London, followed by a master's in women's studies at the University of Oxford and a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art. Venus, Vanishing is her debut novel.
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