The Glassmaker

On the Venetian island of Murano, glassmaking passes from father to son, and women are not meant to touch the craft. When the novel opens in 1486, Orsola Rosso watches with envy as the men of her family turn molten glass into goblets and platters. After her father dies, she teaches herself in secret to make glass beads, and her hidden work becomes the thread that holds the Rosso family together. Chevalier lets time move like cooling glass, so Orsola and her family drift across the centuries in a single life, through plague and war and shifting fortune, from the glory of the Murano guilds to the transformation of Venice into a city of tourists, while Orsola keeps working the fire.