from chapters.ca

Andrew Marlow, a psychiatrist, has a perfectly ordered life--solitary, perhaps, but full of devotion to his profession and the painting hobby he loves. This order is destroyed when the renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes Marlow''s patient.

When Oliver refuses to talk or cooperate, Marlow finds himself going beyond his own legal and ethical boundaries to understand the secret that torments this silent genius, a journey that will lead him into the lives of the women closest to Robert Oliver and toward a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism.

Moving from American museums to the coast of Normandy, from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth, from young love to last love, THE SWAN THIEVES is a story of obsession, the losses of history, and the power of art to preserve human hope.

At first sight, the book seems quite long to read, as it’s thick and almost 600 pages. But, it actually reads quite well, as the narrative is as intriguing as captivating. And I like the fact that it mixes 19th century art (French Impressionists) with a modern painter obsessed with one painting in particular. It deals well with the fact that someone can be so obsess with one thing that he or she forgets everything else, and seems to be living in an alternative world, as well how one specialist can do to understand it. I really liked it more than her first novel, The Historian. It is, overall, a great novel.