43 Novels Featuring Art
This installment of the Riot Recommendation is sponsored by Asunder by Chloe Aridjis.
Marie’s job as a guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery’s masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.
After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open.
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Whether you’re into Ocean’s 11-style art heist stories, tales of tortured artists, or fiction that takes its inspiration from works of art and the people who make lives and livings creating them, you’ve no doubt found yourself lost in a book–a written work of art–that is largely about other artistic media.
We asked you to tell us your favorite novels that feature art and artists, real or invented. Here’s what you came up with:
The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber
The Passion of Artemisia, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and Life Studies by Susan Vreeland
The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro
Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore
Cascade by Maryanne O’Hara
Theft by Peter Carey
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
The Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman
The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Costova
Asylum by Patrick McGrath
Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
The Gravity of Birds by Tracy Guzeman
The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
The Book of Evidence by John Banville
My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
The Masterpiece by Emile Zola
Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
Vandover and the Brute by Frank Norris
The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
Murder as Fine Art by David Morrell
Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier
Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
Tell The Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
The Art of Murder by Jose Carlos Somoza
I am Madame X by Gioia Diliberto
The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan
The Sarantine Mosaic (duology) by Guy Gavriel Kay
Memory and Dream by Charles de Lint
The Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva
And Only to Deceive by Tasha Alexander
What’s Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies
Notes From An Exhibition by Patrick Gale
Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
A Nearly Perfect Copy by Allison Amend
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
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