Amazon.co.uk:Customer reviews: Still Life: The instant Sunday Times bestseller and BBC Between the Covers Book Club pick

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 August 2021

Sarah Winman assembles a diverse cast of characters to deliver a “feel good” saga set in Italy and London. Happy endings I am fine with, but this was too much.

The young army corporal and the ageing art historian we first meet in 1944, in Florence, brought together by chance. This “odd couple” was promising, and the early pages are the best part of the book. Through these two ripple wider circles of family and friends. All salt-of-the-earth types and neither rounded nor credible characters. They felt rather like a “gang” – fans of Friends would probably love it. Chance and rather unlikely good fortune propels the story.

The interesting question is will Ulysses and Evelyn meet up again – hints of Friends again. This propels the reader through until 1980.The setting is divided between an East End pub and an Italian pensione. Like other similar novels the author checklists the big events with broad accuracy. However, the characters seemed remarkably tolerant, open-minded and liberal. Just too good to be true. Too nice really. This makes it difficult to plot social changes as I assume the author would like to do and as the reader would expect.

Dialogue is also anachronistic. Modern expressions are freely given to speakers in the 1940s and 1950s when they were absolutely not current. I am not sure how bothered the author was to get this right, as she also gives us a talking tree and a free-thinking parrot.

In my humble opinion, a novel must convince and challenge – and this does neither.

130 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Oh my goodness...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 July 2021

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What a ridiculous,pretentious load of rubbish. I was determined to finish this book out of a sense of duty to...I'm not sure who or what. The journey/travelogue from WWII was in order to demonstrate..what exactly? The author's familiarity with Florence, Italian food, the weather...? No idea. The series of coincidences is preposterous nd the characters were absurd pastiches with absolutely nothing credible about any of them. The preponderance of gay themes was gratuitous and presumably reflects the authorz

110 people found this helpful

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A. Bear

Sublime

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 August 2021

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I'm still reading this beautiful book, eking it out as I don't want the story to end. Like all of Sarah's books this is a story that I know will live on in me. I can't write a clever critical review as it feels too close to my own story, I would just say, read it.

UPDATE: 08.09.21 Well I finished the book and it stands alongside Sarah's other three books. I adored the writing, happily embraced the magic of both talking trees and parrot and just kept wishing that this was how the world was then and how the world should be now. I've read some rather spiteful one star reviews with thinly veiled queer-bashing and they underline even more why Sarah's writing and Sarah's world view is so important.
Some people seem to think that fiction should be indiscernible from non-fiction though I can't think why they would! I love that Sarah's novels operate in a magical/realist landscape and that chance meeting and coincidence can turn the story round: I find it interesting that we accept coincidences in life but not fiction and I find it fascinating that chance plays such a huge role in our lives but some people insist that there is no place for it in the novel - go back to reading non-fiction I say and leave us dreamers alone.

56 people found this helpful

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Julie Warren

Poor!!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 July 2021

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Pretentious rubbish!!
Who is giving these books 5 stars. Have they ever read a really good book??

40 people found this helpful

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Nicholls Anne

Simply wonderful!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 July 2021

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I dithered about buying this book for a while, and I am so glad I did. At first the lack of speech marks put me off reading the book, as I am a grammar nut, but I soon got used to the conversations that flowed without the need for inverted commas. It was a little hard to get into at first, the London part a bit bizarre, to be honest, but once the story line took me to Florence, the book came alive for me. It is a wonderful evocation of different types of people, all linked in bizarre ways by the end, with Florence, a city I know well, accurately described. The horrendous flooding that occurred is so well depicted and having been there after the waters receded at the time, I know how devastating an event it was for the inhabitants of the city. The story is at times uplifting, bizarre, humorous, one that will live long in the memory when the final page is turned.

34 people found this helpful

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Sandra L

A frustrating read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 January 2022

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I had such high hopes for this - Florence, art history what could go wrong? To be honest nearly everything for me. I didn’t like the lack of quotation marks in the dialogue and frequently found the conversations very obtuse, having to re-read to see what exactly was being said. Didn’t like or believe in any of the characters or the overly saccharine view of the relationships. Hated the continued use of 'kid' in reference to the precocious child character and then there’s the parrot and trees. I kept expecting the whole thing to come together and really grab me, but unfortunately at almost half way through I just can’t face any more.

24 people found this helpful

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Malcolm Breeze

A book to please everyone

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 June 2021

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I came across this book whilst reading the Daily Mail book review section. It certainly received a good review so, I thought I'd give it a try, I'm so pleased that I did. From start to finish I was captivated. I chuckled, I laughed out loud and I had moist eyes on more than one occasion.
The characters are wonderfully loveable, the storyline tugs the heart strings, and the art, history and Italian geography knowledge is a joy to behold.

I can honestly say this is one of the most enjoyable books I've read in years. So much so I've since purchased more from Sarah Winman and I am currently enjoying When God was a rabbit. I highly recommend Still life, well worth a read.

29 people found this helpful

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Jeff Cotton

Made me feel good

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 August 2021

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The recommendations promoting this novel were so fulsome and gushing, stressing how good it would make you feel if you read it, that I approached it with a fair amount of scepticism, which was swiftly dashed by the engaging opening and the extremely pungent picture painted of Florence in 1944, as the Germans retreat north. Evelyn, an elderly lesbian art-historian, meets cute with a handsome young soldier called Ulysses, as hidden altarpieces are found and admired. The changed Ulysses returns to London and his feckless and magnetic wife Peg. They live by a canal in Hackney that sounds very much like Haggerston, the locality of my birth. Here, as in Florence, an odd mixture of characters mix well and make sense, displaying native wit and sensitivity, mostly. You might find the chirpy positivity a bit wearing, but I have a low threshold for that kind of stuff and I coped. Back in Florence Piazza Santo Spirito becomes the centre of things and Pontromo's Deposition/Pieta in nearby Santa Felicita becomes a recurring motif. Most of our time is spent on the Oltrano side of the Arno, although we do venture over the river, often to collect people from the station, especially during the almost unbearably vividly-evoked time of the 1966 flood. Lives are lived, sexualities discovered, and choices made, as the decades pass. This is a book which makes you feel good, and indeed has many scenes that seem written to feature in an uplifting film, but that doesn't stop it being a special read and heartily recommendable.

From Fictional Cities

14 people found this helpful

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djeffrey

Incredibly beautiful and moving with a cast colourful and memorable characters

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 July 2022

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Still Life a story centered around two strangers – a spinster in her sixties and a young British soldier, who meet by chance in Italy and become unlikely friends during the second world war. Although their paths come close to crossing several times after their meeting, they don’t see each other again for many years, but each of them transforms the other’s life.

This book is incredibly beautiful – it has diverse, colourful characters, including a talking cherry tree and a loquacious parrot. It is moving – it made me cry one minute and laugh out loud the next. The descriptions of Florence create a very vivid setting.

However, although the historical events are portrayed accurately, some of the expressions used are anachronistic, perhaps deliberately, but it struck a jarring note for me at times. I also found some of the scenes a bit long, particularly the final chapter, All About Evelyn. Similarly, although I’m interested in art and the history of art, for me, there was so much of this in some chapters that it read a bit like a Wikipedia page and detracted from the story.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book because it really is, as I’ve said, incredibly beautiful. I have had When God was a Rabbit on my TBR list for a long time and look forward to reading it.

8 people found this helpful

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Graham James

Wonderful, beautiful, heart warming, magnificent writing. Read it please!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 July 2022

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Every so often a novel comes along which impresses one so much with its wonder and beauty that one is moved and, in my case at least, one finds it difficult to discover suitable words of praise as to do it justice. This is a truly wonderful book. The writing is magnificent and beyond compare of anything I have read in many a year let alone month. The story is wonderfully tender and heart warming and free of the conflicts and tension that seem to be de rigueur these days, even in so called “feel-good” stories. Trust me when I say this is a feel-good story beyond compare and it was an absolute joy to read.

I am not going to try to analyse the book; this leads to spoilers, and I feel it would be crass. I do not look for meaning. I take from it what I do and, from this, I took a great deal and shall remember it for a long time.

My only negative comment is that I was slightly disappointed with the last phase of the book covering Evelyn’s early trip to Florence and the last act, as it were, back in the present. Somehow the writing did not flow the same in this part and, though it was lovely and poignant, the very final segment felt too short and unfinished.

It also helps, I feel, if you knew a little Italian and something about art. I know neither and so the “in-jokes” were lost on me. I am sure you’d get even more, possibly a lot more, from the book if you knew about these things. Even then it should not put off those like me who are ignorant.

The lack of quotation marks for the speech is a modern technique I do not like, but I did not find it affected the flow or my understanding of who said what to whom. I admit that the parrot was somewhat fantastical, but the beautiful writing and the story and characters were too good and too wonderful to make that matter.

This is the type of book I love and, unless you are cold, unsentimental and lacking any emotion whatever, you too will love it too.

8 people found this helpful

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5 star		64%
4 star		22%
3 star		8%
2 star		3%
1 star		2%

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