A story of love and madness, of obsession and revenge.
Paris, 1938 : Runaway heiress Juliette Willoughby perishes, with her married lover, in an accidental studio fire alongside her Surrealist masterpiece, Self Portrait as Sphinx.
Cambridge, 1991 : Two art history students stumble across proof something sinister was at play in Juliette’s death, threatening to expose the long-buried secrets of the artist’s aristocratic family.
Dubai, Now : An art dealer is accused of the brutal murder of his oldest friend – the last surviving member of the Willoughby dynasty.
Three suspicious deaths over the course of a century. Is the key to unlocking them all hidden in Juliette Willoughby’s lost painting?
A fantastic and stylish thriller/mystery! I absolutely loved it! I can definitely see this as a movie or Netflix series as it’s got a little bit of everything!!
Set around the world of art, it’s set over different timelines and is looking at the tragic death of the artist Juliette in the 1930’s at the peak of her success. So we have the story told from her perspective back in the 1930’s, including life with her fellow artist.
We also meet Caroline and Patrick in the 1990’s while they are at University in Cambridge, looking into the work of Juliette and a missing piece of her artwork ‘Self Portrait of a Sphinx’ which leads them on an epic trail and uncovering some rather dark secrets.
And in the present day timeline we are transported to Dubai, where the famous work of Juliette is about to go on display – it just seems that there’s more than 1 copy! So which is genuine, and where has it been for all these years?
Each timeline blends effortlessly into the next and I couldn’t tell you which one I enjoyed the most as I loved them all! There’s so much discovery going on, wonderful characters to explore and it really shows the dark side of art and artists down the ages. The sense of history in each timeline is wonderfully explored there was never any drop in the suspense. One of my books of the year!!
Renowned journalist and author of The Heart is a Shifting Sea Elizabeth Flock investigates what few dare to confront, or even imagine: the role and necessity of female-led violence in response to systems built against women.
In The Furies, Elizabeth Flock examines how three real-life women have used violence to fight back, and how views of women who defend their lives are often distorted by their depictions in media and pop culture. These three immersive narratives follow Brittany Smith, a young woman from Stevenson, Alabama, who killed a man she said raped her but was denied the protection of the Stand-Your-Ground law; Angoori Dahariya, leader of a gang in Uttar Pradesh, India, dedicated to avenging victims of domestic abuse; and Cicek Mustafa Zibo, a fighter in a thousands-strong all-female militia that battled ISIS in Syria. Each woman chose to use lethal force to gain power, safety, and freedom when the institutions meant to protect them—government, police, courts—utterly failed to do so. Each woman has been criticized for their actions by those who believe that violence is never the answer.
Through Flock’s propulsive prose and remarkable research on the ground—embedded with families, communities, and organizations in America, India, and Syria—The Furies examines, with exquisite nuance, whether the fight for women’s safety is fully possible without force. Do these women’s acts of vengeance help or hurt them, and ultimately, all women? Did they create lasting change in entrenched misogynistic and paternalistic systems? And ultimately, what would societies in which women have real power look like?
Across mythologies and throughout history, the stories of women’s lives frequently end with their bodies as sites of violence. But there are also celebrated tales of women, real and fictional, who have fought back. The novelistic accounts of these three women provoke questions about how to achieve true gender equality, and offer profound insights in the quest for answers.
This is an extremely powerful read, following the stories of 3 women forced to use extreme measures to get justice. The author uses her own trauma as a reason for wanting to research some extraordinary stories that she’d heard about, while mulling over the ‘what ifs’ that she often thought about if she’d taken action over what happened to her.
It also makes you think about dilemma of does it make things worse if you react to something that happens to you – but when you feel let down by the courts or powers that be, sometimes it’s the only way to get justice or peace of mind.
The author meets the women involved so she really gets a sense of their character and their motivation and their stories are amazing.
Brittany had an extremely tough life and lost custody of her children, and uses that motivation to get them back to get clean. When she’s raped by a ‘friend’, her brother gets involved to help and ends up in a fight so Brittany is forced to shoot, killing their attacker and she gets charged with murder. How she is treated afterwards is a thing of nightmares, including the reporting shifting the narrative and it really does shine a spotlight on the minefield of how rape is reported and how women are treated.
Angoori is the next woman featured and she sets out on a journey of avenging victims of domestic abuse in India – a real life ‘Bandit Queen’. She puts together a group of women to deal with the aftermath of violence, because there’s no help from the police and it was fascinating to read her story about staying on the right side of the law.
The final woman featured is Cicek, a fighter in Syria who fought against ISIS in an all female militia and you can only have nothing but admiration for these women who put themselves in harms way to fight the good fight. She is totally fearless and even when injured, her only thought is to get back out fighting again.
The variety of stories are so different but so inspiring and I love that these women have been given a voice through this book. I’m also sure that the author could have told a hundred more stories of a similar vein and it was a book that has stayed with me long after because of the sickening treatment these women faced. A must read!
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Rating: 5 out of 5.
My thanks to the team at Viking Books for the advanced reader copy in return for a fair and honest review.