The novel explores the characters and lifelong achievements of both figures: he protean, domineering, and unrepentant; she sensual, committed, enduring. Looping, impressionistic, and atmospheric, narrated in retrospect from both characters' points of view, the book offers more psychology than plot, but does so persuasively. A remarkable gender parable filtered through a sophisticated imagination.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

[A] concentrated tale of an epic duel between two temperamentally opposite artists.... In prose, by turns, as exquisite as Eileen's creation and as seething as Le Grand's lust, Alison incisively evokes artistic genius and angst, while infusing a historic scandal with profound heartache and resolve.-- "Booklist"

The latest novel from Alison...is itself a kind of spiral...aside from the historical anecdote itself (once described as an "act of naked phallocracy"), the most interesting aspect of the book is the way Alison represents these two different consciousnesses on the page--their slipstream thoughts, both recursive and immediate, but each distinct, pinning their bodies in space.-- "Literary Hub"

In this extraordinary novel, which somehow manages to be both lush and spare, Jane Alison depicts two artists near the ends of their lives, slowly converging on the exquisite villa one has made, and each has loved. Watching Eileen and Le G spiral down into the past and embrace the future, I, too, was transported to the shores of the Mediterranean: light, water, rocks, a gleaming building. Alison writes like no one else.--Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven

In this nimble, atmospheric novel, two artists are drawn together and must reckon with their distinct creative hungers, the landscapes that shape and haunt, and the grace and the wound of the passage of time. Villa E is a work of tremendous psychological intricacy and physical beauty. Jane Alison writes sentences that are as hypnotic and lyric as the sea.--Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise

Alison (The Sisters Antipodes) serves up an elegant meditation on aging, art, and nature, inspired by a famous villa in the French Riviera.... The star of the show is the seascape, the power and beauty of which Alison depicts in lyrical prose.... Readers are in for a treat.-- "Publishers Weekly"

Villa E is an irresistible tale of beauty, obsession and hubris. Jane Alison's portrait of Le Corbusier as a master builder reduced to vandalism by envy is complex and powerful.--Nancy Horan, author of Loving Frank

Elegant and enveloping . . . Ms. Alison's previous work was the critical study "Meander, Spiral, Explode" (2019), which explored geometric patterns in narrative fiction. "Villa E" artfully puts those concepts into practice.--Sam Sacks "Wall Street Journal"

An artful imagining of the tempestuous relationship between [Eileen] Gray and Le Corbusier...Villa E will transfix readers.--NJ McGarrigle "Irish Independent"

A stirring meditation on art and the conflicts that engender sweeping change, whether in architecture or painting or fiction, and the ways age turns us inside out, hardening our resentments -- the hopeful innocence of Patti Smith's 'Just Kids' viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Alison's loose lyricism relies on syncopated rhythms and fluid punctuation; she stays on point even as she plays with Joycean techniques. Villa E is both paean to the legacies of modernism -- from Gray and Le Corbusier to Joyce -- and a beautiful book from a writer who boldly tacks against the winds of literary realism.--Hamilton Cain "Boston Globe"

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation

Pub date: 2024-08-06

Length: 192 pages