Description

By (author) Fletcher Susan

Short /annotation:
A tender and savage novel narrated by the wife of the doctor who tended van Gogh in his last, madly frenetic painting years.

:

Provence, May 1889. The hospital of Saint-Paul-de Mausole is home to the mentally ill.An old monastery, it sits at the foot of Les Alpilles mountains amongst wheat fields, herbs and olive groves. For years, the fragile have come here and lived quietly, found rest behind the shutters and high, sun-baked walls.

Tales of the new arrival – his savagery, his paintings, his copper-red hair – are quick to find the warden”s wife. From her small white cottage, Jeanne Trabuc watches him – how he sets his easel amongst the trees, the irises and the fields of wheat, and paints in the heat of the day.

Jeanne knows the rules; she knows not to approach the patients at Saint-Paul.But this man – paint-smelling, dirty, troubled and intense – is, she thinks, worth talking to. So ignoring her husband”s wishes, the dangers and despite the word mad, Jeanne climbs over the hospital wall. She will find that the painter will change all their lives.

Let Me Tell You About A Man I Knew is a beautiful novel about the repercussions of longing, of loneliness and of passion for life. But it”s also about love- and how it alters over time.

Review quote:
A touching and finely written novel

Review quote:
A tender, passionate tale of reverie and redemption

Review quote:
Seductive . . . [a] lushly written, powerfully charged novel that imagines a friendship between a middle-aged warden”s wife and Vincent Van Gogh

Review quote:
Fletcher explores the concept of ”madness” with compassion, and her beautiful, sensuous writing makes you see [van Gogh”s] paintings with a fresh eye

Review quote:
An exquisitely written portrait of a marriage. I loved it

Review quote:
This is a novel about the power of seeing and being seen, the transcendence of everyday beauty, commonplace joys. Fletcher
unpeels with delicacy and insight the complex layers of the human heart

Review quote:
Fletcher has always attracted praise for the lyricism of her prose . . . here she finds a new restraint that not only intensifies the beauty of her language but feels truer and more profound

Biographical note:
Susan Fletcher was born in 1979 in Birmingham. She is the author of the bestselling Eve Green (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award), Oystercatchers and Witch Light – and most recently, the much-lauded Let Me Tell You About A Man I Knew.