Restoration: A Novel

Summary

Raised within a cosseted circle of British ex-pats in Florence, Iris shocked her family and friends when she married Antonio. Despite the protests of both families, they found a crumbling villa on a windy Tuscan hilltop, called La Foce, and they poured themselves into the house and the land—and what they built together bound them together. They had a son. They finished the house. They were happy. But away from her family and the ease of life to which she was accustomed, Iris begins to slip into a vast and encompassing loneliness. She stumbles into an ill-advised affair with a childhood sweetheart that increasingly takes her away from La Foce and into the social swirl of wartime Rome. She is with her lover when her young son dies from meningitis…and her unbearable sorrow is compounded by terrible guilt. Her indiscretion is noticed by a careful pair of eyes—those of Robert Marshall, the master restorer and dealer of renaissance art. In exchange for his silence, he demands Iris hide a priceless Caravaggio at La Foce, a national treasure that he has sold to the Germans. Neither knows, however, that the Carvaggio is, in fact, a fake, painted by Marshall's assistant as revenge for Marshall's scorning her as a lover and returning to his pregnant wife. Kristin had merely hoped to privately humiliate Marshall. But his sale of the forgery has placed him in far great danger than she anticipated. Compelled to make things right, she travels to La Foce in an attempt to destroy the painting. Meanwhile, inconsolable at the death of his son and at his wife's betrayal, Antonio retreats first into silence, and then into an actual absence. He has left, without saying good-bye, without offering the grieving Iris a chance to redeem herself for her ghastly sin. As WWII moves towards its inexorable conclusion, as the front lines sweeps closer and closer to La Foce, Iris and Kristin not only have to confront the onslaught of soldiers and the destruction of everything they hold dear, but also the consequences of their past mistakes.