Zoia's Gold
A Novel
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Stockholm, December 1999. Madam Zoia, the enigmatic "painter on gold," is dead. The last surviving member of the Romanov court, she leaves behind a house full of paintings, a collection of private papers, and a mystery.
Marcus Elliot travels to Sweden to write the catalog that will accompany the sale of her work. But something feels wrong. Behind the gilded serenity of Zoia's art lie the shadows of a secret life: a dramatic escape from the Bolshevik torturers of the Lubyanka prison, an artistic journey that embraced the excesses of Bohemian Paris, and an unearthly ability to command the devotion of desirable men.
Marcus is to be Zoia's last, triumphant seduction, but with time against him, he must lay his own ghosts to rest -- the scandal that ruined him, the tragedy that shattered his childhood -- before the priceless truth can come within his grasp.
In Zoia's Gold, Philip Sington seamlessly merges past and present, fact and fiction into a bewitching, compulsively readable novel of obsession, betrayal, and redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gorgeously written novel of suspense, which shifts between contemporary Sweden, czarist Russia and 1920s Paris, Sington uses the life of actual Russian-born painter Zoia Korvin-Krukovsky (1903 1999) as a puzzle and fractured mirror for the fictional Marcus Elliot, a British art dealer living in Sweden whose career is scuttled by his role in a scam importing undervalued icons. Commissioned to write a catalogue for an exhibition of Zoia's luminous paintings (gold leaf over gesso), Elliot becomes seduced across time by his subject, believing Zoia holds the key to the suicide of his Swedish-born mother. Sington beautifully captures the raw Baltic winter as Elliot delves into Zoia's correspondence, trying to determine whether her "Crimean" paintings are lost, destroyed or his own fevered fantasy. Elliot is unsure whether his work for another art dealer is part of a legitimate retrospective of Zoia's oeuvre or preparation for an illegal auction that will violate the old woman's will. Readers will come away intrigued by Korvin-Krukovsky and the cross-cultural conundrum Sington so elegantly constructs. Under the pseudonym Patrick Lynch, Sington has coauthored six thrillers.
