From the author of the Giller Prize-nominated Summer Gone comes a sensuous, heartbreaking novel about art, beauty, and the choices we make that define us for life…

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“The Figures of Beauty is a rich, imaginative novel about art, life and beauty. It's epic in scale but intimate in tone, with Macfarlane's prose as crisp and pure as Carrara marble. One of the best novels I've read all year."

Ross King, author of Leonardo and the Last Supper

A young man travels to Paris in 1968, where a series of unlikely events take him to a tiny village in Italy-and the one great love of his life. A marble merchant meets a couple on their honeymoon, introducing them to the sensual beauty of the Carrara region. An Italian woman arrives in Canada to find the father she never knew. A terrible accident in a marble quarry changes the course of a young boy's life and, ultimately, sets in motion each of these stories, which Macfarlane masterfully shapes into a magnificent whole.


Oliver Hughson falls in love with wild, bohemian Anna over the course of one glorious summer in Italy. Bound by a sense of responsibility to his adoptive parents back home in Canada, however, he leaves her, an act he will regret for the rest of his life. Narrated by the daughter he never knew he had, The Figures of Beauty is a love story of mythic proportions. Through luck, fate, and great good fortune, Oliver found the one place and the one woman he should never have left. This is the story of him trying to find his way back.


 
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As the novel unfolds, everyone, it seems, is connected to everyone else through bizarre and beautiful twists and turns of, well, fate.... Figures of Beauty is also a very poignant meditation on regret-about lives half-lived.... Sub-textually, Figures of Beauty is also an aesthetic treatise of the human impulse to make beauty, to create art. And Macfarlane tells this story in a deeply affecting way."

-The Toronto Star

"Macfarlane sculpts several disparate tales into a smooth, rock-solid whole. His ambitions are high, but in a language as rich as the fruits of the scenic landscapes in which he situates his characters and their stories, he pulls off a far grander narrative with skill and intrigue."

-Vancouver Weekly

"The strength is that a dreamlike mood is established, in which beautiful artifacts-a German Luger, the statue of a woman with a jug-recur like magical objects. They serve to tie the narrative together and to confirm Anna's view that 'stories are hidden in objects'."

-National Post