The Vintner's Luck: A Novel - Softcover

Knox, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312264100 ISBN 13: 9780312264109

Publisher: Picador, 2000

Synopsis

One summer night in 1808, Sobran Jodeau sets out to drown his love sorrows in his family's vineyard when he stumbles on an angel. Once he gets over his shock, Sobran decides that Xas, the male angel, is his guardian sent to counsel him on everything from marriage to wine production. But Xas turns out to be a far more mysterious character. Compelling and erotic, The Vintner's Luck explores a decidedly unorthodox love story as Sobran eventually comes to love and be loved by both Xas and the young Countess de Valday, his friend and employer at the neighboring chateau.

About this title

Review:

Elizabeth Knox's fifth book, her first to be published in the UK, plays out its huge themes in a small Burgundian village at the time of Napoleon. A novel of forbidden love, wine and immortality, it yields up its secrets--beautiful, tragic and horrifying--one by one, so they're as unexpected as the angel Sobran Jodeau, the young vintner, encounters in his vineyard one night in 1808. Xas is breathtakingly beautiful, has huge expressive white wings, leather trousers and smells softly of snow. He is a keen gardener, and also profoundly curious about mortals, how they feel, how they live, how they make their choices. They talk, and Xas persuades Jodeau to meet him--same time, same place--every year.

Jodeau marries, fathers children, and continues--bar a couple of years when he's off fighting, whoring and trying to keep his best friend alive on the Russian front--to meet with Xas. Their friendship deepens. Jodeau's wine improves, and the joys and troubles of village life wash around him. But this strange relationship between man and angel is inherently unstable, and following the death of Jodeau's beloved younger daughter, it veers off in a direction neither had anticipated. And then Xas tells Jodeau something that drives the vintner almost beyond madness. --Lisa Gee

Review:

"Original, often astonishingly vivid...Xas is one of the best angels since William Blake's." --Nina Auerbach, The New York Times Book Review

"Daringly exploring the spiritual worth of sesnual pleasure, New Zealand writer Knox's imaginative, imagistic tale soars." --Entertainment Weekly

"Rich prose and an original plot...a delightful, thought-provoking read." --Robin Vidimos, The Denver Post

"Strangely compelling...multilayered and challanging...[The Vintner's Luck] is not your typical angel story." --David Tedhams, The Washington Post Book World

"Elizabeth Knox spreads her odd and original gossamer over many things....[Her] imagination resembles one of those Burgundy slopes, mysteriously sunned and fed, that produces a vintage unlike any other." --Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0312264100
• ISBN 13: 9780312264109
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288