Peggy
Books | Fiction / Literary
Rebecca Godfrey
CBC's Best Canadian Fiction of 2024 • The Winnipeg Free Press' Best Books of 2024 • 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."Brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times." —Jenny Offill“Magnificent . . . Readers will be won over by Godfrey’s incandescent portrait of a singular woman.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)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 from the unexpected restrictions that come with vast fortune.In a tour de force of imagination and insight, 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.
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More Details:
Author
Rebecca Godfrey
Pages
320
Publisher
Knopf Canada
Published Date
2024-08-13
ISBN
0345808355 9780345808356
Community ReviewsSee all
"This is a DNF for me.<br/><br/>Peggy is a historical fiction novel about Peggy Guggenheim, someone who I know little about, and unfortunately, reading this book hasn’t made me any more interested in learning about her.<br/><br/>Like other reviews have mentioned, the writing can be difficult to get through. There’s a lot of shifting timelines, which you might not immediately pick up on due to the stream-of-conscious writing and the frequent lack of quotation marks (which isn’t always done consistently). Sometimes it feels like a thought is written with the intention of being profound, but it just falls flat like an incomplete sentence. Other times it’s difficult to separate what actually happens in real life versus what is only taking place in the MC’s mind, which makes it hard to connect to any of the characters and care about what happens to them.<br/><br/>Readers who might enjoy this book are ones already interested in the life of Peggy Guggenheim <i>and</i> who enjoy a stream-of-conscious writing style.<br/><br/>Special thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for providing this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.<br/><br/>Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey is available now wherever books are sold."
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Amber Smith
