Book Review: Villa America

Recently thanks to Mumsnet I was sent the book Villa America by Lisa Klaussmann to review.

“Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Cole and Linda Porter, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos - all are summer guests of Gerald and Sara Murphy. From vastly different backgrounds, the Murphys met and married young, and set forth to create a beautiful world. They alight on Villa America: their coastal oasis of artistic genius, debauched parties, impeccable style and flamboyant imagination. But before long, a stranger enters into their relationship, and their marriage must accommodate an intensity that neither had forseen. When tragedy strikes, their friends reach out to them, but the golden bowl is shattered, and neither Gerald nor Sara will ever be the same”

 At first glance the cover suggests a summer romance until that is you read the blurb! Not quite the setting for romance! A wonderful written book it’s more a historical fiction than anything else. And a very refreshing open historical book too.

The book is actually the fictionalised story of Sara & Gerald Murphy the real life couple on whom F.Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” was based upon. A lot of the story of this couple is rather loose and blurred with the facts and some of the letters from real life characters such as F.Scott Fitzgerald himself are mingled as it were with characters from the authors mind. However the minute you delve in to the books you are whisked back to the beautiful time of cocktails and into the gorgeous described French Riviera.

Lisa Klaussmann

It is an amazing book, beautifully written with a great deal of passion and love for the story. Its also heart-breaking with the opening line being a death of a young man but oh so wonderfully written you can’t help but want to read on…

“The sky was as blue as a robin’s egg on the afternoon they pulled

Owen Chambers’ body out of the Baie des Anges”

I’m a great believer in first lines drawing you into a book, just think of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier and this book had sat on the table until walking past I flicked it open. I was hooked immediately. Pick it up but don’t expect a light easy read!