The Glassmaker

by Tracy Chevalier

The Borough Press

It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers on Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes.

Tracy Chevalier does something rather surprising with this book.  Instead of her characters living in one time period, she has them skipping like a stone through the centuries. We follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss, from a plague devastating Venice in the 1500s to the Napoleonic wars, to the soldiers of the Great War of 1915 stripping its palazzos bare, to the quarantine of COVID; from the domination of Murano and its maestros to the transformation of the city of trade into a city of tourists. In every era, the Rosso women ensure that their work, and their bonds, endure.  It’s a fascinating way of living though 500 years of Venice without losing the characters we care about!

“This charming fable is at once a love story that skips through six centuries, and also a love song to the timeless craft of glassmaking. Chevalier probes the fierce rivalries and enduring loyalties of Murano’s glass dynasties, capturing the roar of the furnace, the sweat on the skin, and the glittering beauty of Venetian glass.” – Geraldine Brooks, author of Horse

“A triumph… a brilliant idea carried out with confidence and brio and a deep love of an extraordinary city. The ingenuity of the time-skipping is beyond admiration.” – Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy

“[A] time-skipping Venetian tour de force … The sparing intensity to her scene-setting, her vital lightness of touch, her ability to show that historical fiction, at its strongest, always tells a story of the present as well as the past—t​hese are qualities born of the kind of painstaking practice that requires not just talent but something every bit as amorphous as molten glass: time.” —Guardian​

“What struck me was Tracy Chevalier’s creative reshaping of an element most writers feel they must be accountable for in strict sequential detail—t​ime. To say the least, Chevalier bends that rule beautifully. … Rather than defying the currents of history, The Glassmaker treats time like the materials of glass itself, heating its raw information into condensed form and shaping it in the writer’s crucible into something that is simultaneously new, old, unexpected and beautiful.” –Bookreporter
 
“Tracy Chevalier pens a novel as ambitious, audacious, and artistic as a Venetian glass goblet. Beginning in the height of the Renaissance and hopscotching with casual ease through the centuries to the modern day, she examines the ever-changing city of Venice through the eyes of Orsola Rosso, defiantly gifted daughter of a Murano glassmaking family, and how her unique gift with glass shines through time, fragile but unbreakable. The Glassmaker is a thing of beauty.” – Kate Quinn, author of The Diamond Eye

“Tracy Chevalier returns to the world of medieval craft and gives us another determined heroine—a Venetian glassmaker who penetrates the closed world of the men of Murano. Meticulously researched and evoking the beauty of the Venice lagoon, the story challenges and transports the reader through time and place.” – Philippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl