Chevalier, Tracy

(US, 1962– )

Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999) is a heartrending account of the story behind a Vermeer painting (which shares its title with this book). Sixteen-year-old Griet comes as a maid into the Vermeer household, and has to endure not just the painter's jealous wife, countless children, canny mother-in-law and lecherous patron, but also the odd (and not altogether unwelcome) attentions of Vermeer himself. It is as much a novel about human emotions and desires as it is about the way a painter's eyes might see the world; and it manages to be equally enlightening about both. Chevalier's next novel Falling Angels (2001) is set in England at the dawn of the twentieth century, and follows two families, the Colemans and the Waterhouses, as they try to deal with the changes brought by the new century and the new reign.

Beryl Bainbridge, Rose Tremain, Joanne Harris  DHa