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[[Category:General Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|General Fiction]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author= Dominic Smith
|title= The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
|rating= 5
|genre= Historical Fiction
|summary= If you find the techniques used by Rembrandt and Vermeer fascinating, ''The Last Painting of Sara de Vos'' provides a masterclass in how to work up a canvas in stages. Framing the novel as the story of a seventeenth century Dutch painting, Dominic Smith vividly sketches out the main contours of his characters and the three time periods they inhabit before we are even one fifth of the way through. Sara is one of the few women artists of the period and her painting is of children skating on a frozen canal, her now dead daughter its central figure. The painting has been in Marty de Groot's family since before Isaac Newton was born and he is the patent lawyer from whom it is stolen in 1950s Manhattan. Ellie Shipley forged a copy of the painting in her postgraduate student years and in 2000 finds herself at the centre of a gathering storm which threatens to destroy her reputation as one of Sydney's foremost fine art academics. Satisfying though those first descriptions are, we then understand these are merely the author's equivalent of the delicate chalk lines used by painters of the Dutch Golden Age to mark out the composition which will follow.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>192526680X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Stewart O'Nan
|summary=Dartmouth Circle has always been the epitome of British middle class propriety. Manicured lawns, well-kept house facades… All is where it should be and life is ordered, with the disrupting influence of the town's university students out of sight and out of mind. Imagine, then, the horror when the good citizens of the Circle hear that one of their houses… THEIR houses… has been bought as student accommodation. Will it be the harbinger of doom they expect?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784972665</amazonuk>
}}