New This Week: Claude & Camille by Stephanie Cowell

Stephanie Cowell is building a reputation writing beautiful, cinematic books that bring to life artists from various eras. Nicholas Cooke, the story of a young actor in 1593 London, won the American Book Award in 1996. More recently, Marrying Mozart was translated into seven languages and optioned for film.

Cowell seems poised on the cusp of very great things. This feeling is backed by her most recent work, the rich and satisfying Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (Crown). The book breaths life into the story of the young Impressionist painter Claude Monet and Camille Doncieux, the well-born Parisian with whom he fell in love.

As Cowell points out in her historical notes to Claude & Camille:

All the world knows Monet as an old man in his gardens at Giverny, but the genesis of that revered painter was a very determined and handsome young man: proud, sometimes haughty, and sometimes humble, in need of love and understanding and someone to buy his work. If he had not stood his ground through all his hardships with the help of those who loved him, there would be no water lily paintings today.

In a way, that and the birth of Impressionism is what Claude & Camille is all about.