Still Life: A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)

Gosh how I loved getting swept up in this book. Such a beautiful tale of friendship, chosen family, art, food, Italy, and so much love.

Fabulous book. Opening chapter was my favourite. I loved the exploration of sexuality throughout the book. Always love a good animal character.

Some books you never want to end and this is one of them. An epic tale set in wartime London and Florence populated by characters you desperately want to hang out with. Loved it!

Absolutely LOVED this book

CRANKY'S BOOK CLUB REVIEW OF STILL LIFE BY SARAH WINMAN Everyone agreed that Still Life was a perfect choice for summer reading. It was a really pleasant book to read: a large cast of appealling characters looking out for each other through good times and bad and living occasionally tough but ultimately fulfilling lives, with much of the action taking place in gorgeous settings. One of us remarked on how good it was to have poetic dialogue from many of the characters, regardless of their social class, and that it was sad that this was looked down upon and seen as affected today. The description of setting, particularly of Florence, was beautifully sumptuous and highly engaging, creating a lovely literary land to escape into. Some of the characters were more compelling and likeable than others: whether we liked Evelyn or not largely depended on whether we had encountered real life Evelyns and had been exposed to their selfishness and their sense of entitlement, although we agreed that her character played an important role in the novel and that her insights into women's role in the history of art were fascinating. Ulysses was agreed to be lovely and a pivotal character for the ensemble, carrying their world on his shoulders in the same way that he carried his globe out of the studio during the flood, but some of us felt that his character development appeared to start and end in the war. We were very split on Claude the parrot: some of us loved him and others found him to be, at best, highly unbelievable as a parrot and at worst, a clunky plot device. One of us remarked that the book was a bit too pleasant to be useful as a novel. Everyone (give or take the odd minor character) was so... nice! Characters that could have created real drama or tension, such as Ted, Col or the contessa were quickly neutered or sidelined so that they couldn't create too much trouble. Characters who, in real life, would have had real conflicts and dangers to overcome weren't exposed to those conflicts or dangers and one of us felt that the novel suffered badly from this as a result: in the real life pre-backpacker trail 1950's and early 1960's, a lone travelling Alys would have been likely to have had some hair-raising adventures as she travelled on a shoestring between London and Florence. The same reader felt that Cress's pair of psychically-inspired gambling wins were a lazy plot device to create the funds for the characters' lovely lifestyles, and that they concealed a missed opportunity for a more dramatic, gritty and believable journey of a cast of working class Londoners to the streets of Florence. Other readers didn't feel these lacks in the novel and remarked that real lives do sometimes have lucky breaks and a lack of drama and that the novel didn't need 'grit' to work. The final section's description of Evelyn's youth was felt to be a bit 'stuck on', annoying some of us. We wondered whether it had been written prior to the rest of the book, creating the character of Evelyn and inspiring the other characters that she meets on her later travels. Some of us felt that the story would make an excellent film, whereas others thought that the close-up interpersonal nature of the story would lend itself better to a TV series, where the individual characters' stories could be gone into in more detail. We agreed that the book was gorgeously sensual, glorying in love and beauty in all its forms and in the most positive of human emotions, and that in this way, it might have been written as some kind of guide to life. Whether believable or not, we found Still Life to be a gorgeously indulgent and thoroughly enjoyable summer read. We rated it as 9/10.