This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt. You may receive a partial or no refund on used, damaged or materially different returns.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (15) from $11.62 + $3.99 shipping

Follow the author

Alison Booth

+ Follow

More books from this author

The Painting Paperback – Abridged, June 1, 2022

by Alison Booth (Author)

3.8 33 ratings

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$15.62","priceAmount":15.62,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"15","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"62","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"0YjXAPLZz5yhH0Ij95QpKHLijdaeTsZ%2BSoQm01VayQECCOgO2Xy25T4vG71OGCYCnGsDdv2YKiTRYIsqSDMjAHDA14GAxWqO%2BfFsKx%2FJUwE%2FqK8bmvrp2V1ThTm8PmE0WEvAsx8I1BLPxU4%2FoJtKVXfKZ22i4zNNzkHwVCpE7OyUnXNi3JjaBMoXXPMMTP%2FK","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

A young Hungarian woman confronts her family’s past in an engrossing quest for a stolen painting.

When Anika Molnar flees her home country of Hungary not long before the break-up of the Soviet Union, she carries only a small suitcase – and a beautiful and much-loved painting of an auburn-haired woman in a cobalt blue dress from her family’s hidden collection.

Arriving in Australia, Anika moves in with her aunt in Sydney, and the painting hangs in pride of place in her bedroom. But one day it is stolen in what seems to be a carefully planned theft, and Anika’s carefree life takes a more ominous turn. Sinister secrets from her family’s past and Hungary’s fraught history cast suspicion over the painting’s provenance, and she embarks on a gripping quest to uncover the truth.

Hungary’s war-torn past contrasts sharply with Australia’s bright new world of opportunity in this moving and compelling mystery.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Booth keeps up the suspense...while examining, with delicacy and insight, the corrosive personal cost of living in a Soviet satellite state." - The Herald Scotland

"What Booth does so well in The Painting is threading the mystery of the stolen painting through her narrative while maintaining pace and tension. Booth is an elegant writer who excels at inhabiting the intellectual headspace of her characters." - The Canberra Times

"There is a mystery about the painting, a story with its roots in the European past...an intriguing [story] luring the reader forward." - The Sydney Morning Herald

About the Author

Alison Booth was born in Melbourne, brought up in Sydney and has worked in the UK and in Australia as a professor as well as a novelist. Alison’s work has been translated into French and has also been published by Reader’s Digest Select Editions in both Asia and Europe. Alison, who holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics, is an active public speaker and has participated in many writers’ festivals and literary events.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ RedDoor Press (June 1, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1913062651
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1913062651
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.9 x 7.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #857,760 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #118 in Eastern European Literature (Books)
- #9,057 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #35,588 in Crime Thrillers (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.8 33 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Alison Booth

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Alison Booth is the author of seven novels and has also contributed short stories to international collections including Antipodes and New Writing. Her novels have been published by -Penguin Random House and by RedDoor. Her awards include a Varuna Longlines Fellowship from the Eleanor Dark Foundation, the Highly Commended Award in the 2011 ACT Book of the Year Award, and the Highly Commended Award in the 2020 ACT Notables Award. Alison is an Australia Reads Ambassador, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and recipient of the 2017 ESA Distinguished Fellow Award.

Born in Australia, Alison Booth gained a degree in architecture before transferring to economics. She is Professor Emeritus at the ANU, earned a PhD from the London School of Economics, and spent over two decades living and working in the UK before returning to Australia. She wrote her first novel at the age of nine, before other distractions set in.

Alison lives in Canberra’s inner north with her economic historian husband, with whom she shares a deep love of history and the Australian landscape. She has two adult daughters who live and work in the Northern Territory, and two beautiful grandchildren.

For more information visit: https://www.alisonbooth.net/home

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5

33 global ratings

1 star

0%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Jill

Wow

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2022

4 stars
Wow! This is just an incredible book that takes the readers on an amazing journey. This is a great read with a thoroughly researched background and amazing characters.

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2023

I couldn’t put this book down, it drew me in completely, the descriptive writing was well done, and had me able to imagine the people and places where this story took place, as well as being able to see ‘The Painting’ that Anikar loves and which causes so much drama for her and those around her.

This novel had two aspects I enjoy, a good mystery and history written in a way I can appreciate, empathise and learn from. I love learning as I read. Set in 1989, in Sydney, Anika, who immigrated from Hungary 5 years previously, during the time of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall and all that came with it, has escaped a past she tries to forget, but which is a constant in her life, from tapped telephone calls to her family, memories of being arrested by the secret police and a constant distrust of letting people in. I admit to not knowing as much as I feel I should about this time in history and I appreciate novels that can give me insight into this time and place, I was 14 in 1989 and I knew next to nothing about what was going on on the other side of the world, and what people had to endure during this time.

When Anika left Hungary to live with her aunt Tabilla, who had escaped over the border into Austria many years before, after the death of her husband and immigrated to Australia, she brings with her a painting of an auburn-haired woman in a cobalt blue dress, that was once her uncle’s possession. This painting is the catalyst for everything that happens secrets, lies, theft and distrust, as Anika’s life is thrown into the centre of a mystery about where the painting came from, who owns it and who is telling the truth. Anika starts to doubt everything her parents and her grandmother have told her about the painting as questions about its providence arise, it is stolen, and someone discloses a secret from his past.

I could really feel Anika’s struggle as she meets the three men that will turn her world around. Daniel, a curator from the art gallery of NSW, offers to help her get the painting valued, but he also seems interested in her as a person, Jonno, whom she meets at the art gallery doesn’t seem trustworthy and turns out to be a journalist, and Julius, a friend of her aunt’s, an art collector, who is more than a little weirded out when he sees the painting. Anika already struggles to trust people and open up to them and when the painting is stolen, she doesn’t know whom to trust, each man seems to have a motive and each one is suspicious in his behaviour in some way. I myself wasn’t sure who could be trusted and though I initially liked Daniel, I wasn’t completely sure about him.

Things that come to light after the painting is stolen, the history of the Nazis and the Russian’s looting and stealing artworks, and her own family’s secretiveness around the painting, cause Anika a great deal of stress and when the Iron Curtain falls and she is able to return safely to Hungary to visit her parents, she goes determined to uncover the mystery and get some answers.

It is during this trip that she also learns to trust and to heal and right one of the wrongs of the past.

This paragraph from near the end of the novel really spoke to me:

Her thoughts floated free. Free of drag, free of resistance, and she felt an expanding sense of detachment. Not only was she seeing the earth from a different vantage point but she was seeing her life in a new way too. Generations of her family had been scarred by upheavals, and their stories were multiplied millions and millions of times all over the globe. Everywhere there were people like them. Damaged people, displaced people. But there were survivors too.

This was a fabulous read and I will be looking to catch up on this author’s backlist if this book is anything to go by, I am sure I will enjoy them.