The Vintner's Luck - Hardcover

Knox, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374283923 ISBN 13: 9780374283926

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc, 1998

Synopsis

One summer night in 1808, Sobran Jodeau encounters an angel named Xas, whom he believes to be his guardian angel, but as their relationship develops, Sobran discovers the mystery that surrounds Xas, who is a favorite of both God and Satan

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:

"The nearest useful comparison to Knox's conceptual framework is Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, which also explores social power and control in the context of other possible quantum universes." (ABC Magazine)

"Ms Knox's philosophical scheme defies brief summary: like a witty, post-modern Milton, she rewrites the Christian myth and the whole cosmology of 'Paradise Lost." (The Economist)

"This is a gorgeous novel: as fine, rich, satiny and unpredictable as the vintages that it describes...A beautifully written exploration of the inexplicable, into which is woven an all-too-human chronicle of burning desire, violence, murderousness, bitter jealousy, curiosity, sexual deviations, shame and a fidelity of a sort." (The Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0374283923
• ISBN 13: 9780374283926
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 283