Let Me Tell You About A Man I Knew
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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.
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.
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- Published: Jun 01 2017
- Pages: 272
- 196 x 128mm
- ISBN: 9780349007632
Press Reviews
- Guardian
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
- Sunday Times
A touching and finely written novel
- Express
A tender, passionate tale of reverie and redemption
- Metro
Seductive . . . [a] lushly written, powerfully charged novel that imagines a friendship between a middle-aged warden's wife and Vincent Van Gogh
- Saga
Fletcher explores the concept of 'madness' with compassion, and her beautiful, sensuous writing makes you see [van Gogh's] paintings with a fresh eye
- Woman & Home
An exquisitely written portrait of a marriage. I loved it
- Guardian
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