The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

What makes the tale enthralling are the details Chevalier offers about the social customs of the time and, especially, the craft of weaving as it was practiced in Brussels. Le Viste's wife, Geneviève, tells Nicholas to create scenes with a unicorn but Nicholas's love of women-and especially of Geneviève's beautiful daughter Claude-inspires the extraordinary faces and gestures of the women he depicts.

We are introduced to Nicholas des Innocents, the handsome, irrepressibly seductive artist who designed the works for the cold Le Viste, a rich, grim social climber who bought his way into the nobility and cares more about impressing the king and his court than pleasing the wife who has disappointed him by bearing three girls and no sons. Building on the little that is known or surmised-in this case that the tapestries were most likely commissioned by the French noble Jean Le Viste and made in a workshop in Brussels at the end of the 15th century-she imagines her way into a lost world. As with her Vermeer novel, she takes full creative advantage of the mystery that shrouds an extraordinary collaborative work of art. Showed how a picture can inspire thousands of words, yokes her limpid, quietly enthralling storytelling to the six Lady and the Unicorn tapestries that hang in the Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris. Chevalier, whose bestselling Girl with a Pearl Earring

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier