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Literary Fiction
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| Critics: |
A dazzling, richly imagined novel about Peggy Guggenheim—a story of art, family, love, and becoming oneself—by the award-winning author of Under the Bridge, now a Hulu limited series starring Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone.
Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and now legendary art collector, sits in the sun at her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. She's in a reflective mood, thinking back on her thrilling, tragic, nearly impossible journey from her sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to here: iconoclast and independent woman.
Rebecca Godfrey's Peggy is a blazingly fresh interpretation of a woman who defies every expectation to become an original. The daughter of two Jewish dynasties, Peggy finds her cloistered life turned upside down at fourteen, when her beloved father perishes on the Titanic. His death prompts Peggy to seek a life of passion and personal freedom and, above all, to believe in the transformative power of art. We follow Peggy as she makes her way through the glamorous but sexist and anti-Semitic art worlds of New York and Europe and meet the numerous men who love her (and her money) while underestimating her intellect, talent, and vision. Along the way, Peggy must balance her loyalty to her family with her need to break free from their narrow, snobbish ways and the unexpected restrictions that come with vast fortune.
Rebecca Godfrey's final book—completed by her friend, the acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison, following Godfrey's death in 2022—brings to life the woman who helped make the Guggenheim name synonymous with art and genius.
"Magnificent...In lively first-person narration, Godfrey captures Peggy's constant wavering between boldness and self-doubt, between the pull of conventional motherhood and the longing to be free...Readers will be won over by Godfrey's incandescent portrait of a singular woman." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A devoted, creative version of the life, often in romantic thrall to the mercurial, impulsive, insulated figure at its center...A vivid, indulgent imagining of the legendary collector." —Kirkus Reviews
"Godfrey focuses on Peggy's coming into her full powers in this deeply empathic fictionalization of Peggy Guggenheim's extraordinary life, a lush novel infused with torment, determination, and wit. With keenly drawn characters based on real-life figures and a vivid and illuminating historical context, this bravura projection of Peggy's spirit and dramatization of her adventures, seamlessly completed by Leslie Jamison after Godfrey's death, is enthralling, revealing, and resonant." —Booklist
"Peggy had often been misunderstood and disrespected, seen as a slutty dilettante who threw her money around. But Rebecca [Godfrey] took Peggy seriously, as a woman full of wit, savvy, and passion, hungry for experience and purpose and with an eye for art, and for people, that others couldn't yet appreciate. " —Leslie Jamison, in The New Yorker
"A story about the daughter and heiress to the Guggenheim fortune and her artistic and romantic exploits, and her quest to find her own direction and vision despite the pull and sway of her family name. Pick it up for the high society family dramas, for the coming-of-age antics, for the preening and prestigious art world depictions, or for the beauty of the writing itself, the two minds that came together to produce this work of exploration, intrigue, and self-discovery." —Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2024
"A beautifully imagined and superbly written novel about the tenuous line between life and art. Godfrey brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times." —Jenny Offill
"A tremendous work of the imagination...Peggy Guggenheim embodied the twentieth century, but attempts to capture her vitality and uniqueness have tended to fall flat. No more! Rebecca Godfrey's prose is as stylish as her protagonist and every bit as deep, sensuous, and thoughtful...An unparalleled life presented as a page-turner." —Gary Shteyngart
Rebecca Godfrey (1967–2022) was an award-winning novelist and journalist. Her books include The Torn Skirt, finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the award-winning true-crime story Under the Bridge, adapted as a Hulu limited series starring Riley Keough as Rebecca Godfrey. Godfrey earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and taught writing at Columbia University. She lived with her husband and daughter in upstate New York.
Leslie Jamison's books include The Empathy Exams, The Recovering, the novel The Gin Closet, and the memoir Splinters. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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