Allison Levy holds a PhD in Italian Renaissance art and architecture from Bryn Mawr College. She has published five books on Italian visual culture, and has taught in the US, Italy, and the UK. She oversees the digital publishing program at Brown University.
I wrote
House of Secrets: The Many Lives of a Florentine Palazzo
A magnificent and meticulous literary account of the architecture—or, rather, labyrinth—of imagination and memory, this tortured tale of mis-seeing and misunderstanding, of repercussions and regrets, is centered on the events of summer 1935, when a precocious 13-year-old, Briony Tallis, witnesses—and misconstrues—encounters between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. Most notably, the locations where these encounters take place—a fountain on the estate, the library, the grand manor itself—suggest the complicated ways in which we perceive our own and others’ identities within and against houses.
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a…
This #1 New York Times bestseller grapples with what houses say about who we are—or want to become. Slip into a tragic entanglement between Massoud Behrani, a recent immigrant from Iran intent on restoring his family’s honor by purchasing a California bungalow up for auction, and Kathy Nicolo, the house’s owner, and a recovering drug addict determined to hold on to her family property. This penetrating novel will satisfy readers’ unquenchable thirst for stories that explore the psychological ramifications of emotional and social overinvestment in the promise of a house.
A recent immigrant from the Middle East-a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force-yearns to restore his family's dignity in California. A recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck struggles to hold onto the one thing she has left?her home. And her lover, a married cop, is driven to extremes to win her love.
Andre Dubus III's unforgettable characters-people with ordinary flaws, looking for a small piece of ground to stand on-careen toward inevitable conflict. Their tragedy paints a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize, this poignant historical novel probes social, political, and architectural structures—as rigid as they are vulnerable—in early-to-mid 20th-century Britain. The protagonist, Stevens, is a devoted butler at Darlington Hall, a stately home newly acquired by a wealthy American named Mr. Farraday. In 1956, Stevens pays a visit to the former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, during which he reminisces about events at Darlington Hall in the 1920s and 1930s. This engrossing story—on purpose and on place—elegantly captures the decline of the British aristocracy, the role of memory, and the tensions of disillusionment.
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available to preorder*
The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and cemented Kazuo Ishiguro's place as one of the world's greatest writers. David Lodge, chairman of the judges in 1989, said, it's "a cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance". This is a haunting evocation of lost causes and lost love, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change. Ishiguro's work has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Stevens, the long-serving butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on…
Set in 19th-century Sicily, this luscious novel reveals the fragility of foundations—of self, of class, of kingdom. The story focuses on the decadent and decaying Italian aristocracy amidst the political upheavals of the 1860s. The main protagonists are the Salina family, above all the patriarch Don Fabrizio, who must accept change if things are to remain the same. A central theme is demise and the fading of beauty, sublimely rendered in rich language that details the scents, colors, and textures of a crumbling family seat.
The Leopard is a modern classic which tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution.
'There is a great feeling of opulence, decay, love and death about it' Rick Stein
In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi's landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them.
A monumental portrait of time and place, this seductive novel transports readers deep inside the private world of the English nobility in the waning days of a gilded age of power and privilege. From the 1920s to the early 1940s, we follow in the footsteps of protagonist Charles Ryder as he becomes infatuated with the wealthy Marchmain family, forging complicated friendships with siblings Sebastian and Julia Flyte. Against the backdrop of Brideshead Castle, a singular story of love and loss—and of salvaging who and/or what remains among the ruins—plays out most provocatively.
It is WW2 and Captain Charles Ryder reflects on his time at Oxford during the twenties and a world now changed. As a lonely student Charles was captivated by the outrageous and decadent Sebastian Flyte and invited to spend time at the Flyte's family home - the magnificent Brideshead. Here Charles becomes infatuated by its eccentric, aristocratic inhabitants, and in particular with Julia, Sebastian's startling and remote sister. But as his own spiritual and social distance becomes marked, Charles discovers a crueller world, where duty and desire, faith and happiness can only ever conflict.
House of Secrets tells the remarkable story of Palazzo Rucellai from behind its celebrated façade. The house, beginning with its piecemeal assemblage by one of the richest men in Florence in the fifteenth century, has witnessed endless drama, from the butchering of its interior to a courtyard suicide to champagne-fueled orgies on the eve of World War I to a recent murder on its third floor. When the author, an art historian, serendipitously discovers a room for let in the house, she lands in the vortex of history and is tested at every turn—inside the house and out.
Her residency in Palazzo Rucellai is informed as much by the sense of desire giving way to disappointment as by a sense of denial that soon enough must succumb to the truth. House of Secrets is about the sharing of space, the tracing of footsteps, the overlapping of lives. It is about the willingness to lose oneself behind the façade, to live between past and present, to slip between the cracks of history and the crevices of our own imagination.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
