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

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Sublime

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 August 2021

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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gerardpeter

Spaghetti alla Melodrama

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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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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Allan Hildon

Good but not Winman's best

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 October 2021

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As a "feelgood" antidote to our collective lockdown blues Still Life ticks all the boxes, but realistically, it's not Winman's best novel. There are some characteristic Winman touches, the talking tree and philosphical parrot, that in any other context would be absurd. Winman employs these rhetorical devices with aplomb, but, ironically, this undermines the plausibility of a plot that relies heavily on windfall and coincidence. Sadly, it all ends happily.
My other gripe lies with superficiality of the central male character. I admire Winman for her exceptional ability to get under the skin of a man, but Ulysses Temper is a shadow of Ellis Judd or Francis Drake. The other male characters are little more than mannequins.
At least the lead lesbian doesn't come to a grizzly ending, but maybe that's what the book needed.
I'm hoping for better in Winman's next exposition.
Six months later...
I have warmed to this book after a second read. I put my hands up, I probably placed too much emphasis on my dissapointment over not being wooed by another Ellis Judd, and missed the centrality of this being a book about women. Mea culpa.
I wouldn't be surprised if it reaches 5 stars on a third reading. It's that type of book.

2 people found this helpful

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Amanda-Trimmer Brightman

Brilliant read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 September 2021

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Thus is a wierd but wonderful novel about relationships between people, friendships and love after the fragmented life post war.
It is primarily based in Florence Tuscany and revolves around Ulysees Temper a man returning from war to the home he once had.
This is beautially written, the characters and environments really come to life and I became utterly absorbed by it all.
This book stayed with me for some time after I had finished, so much so, that I might actually read it again - something I never do!!

2 people found this helpful

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Minerva

Art in Florence

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 June 2022

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Essentially Still Life is about love and friendship, lots of different kinds of love: love of art, food, friends, romantic and sexual love. The book takes readers on a journey through the 2nd world war up to the present. The reader can become fully immersed in people of Florence and its art. It would definitely encourage me to go back to Florence and spend more time looking at art. The book is very well researched.

2 people found this helpful

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Patricia Robinson

Good read & interesting subject matter.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 June 2022

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I liked the way the storyline kept moving along. I didn’t care much for the lack of punctuation (speech marks). A very interesting and different subject matter especially Eveline artistic expertise.

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Jason Barber

Still Life.....An amazing story of kind hearts!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 May 2022

Verified Purchase

Winman is a great narrator of hope. One can have a great time while going through the pages of STILL LIFE. I recommend this novel if you're a fan of Winman or enjoy historical fiction.

One person found this helpful

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K I Woollacott

A bit disjointed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 January 2022

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Found this a bit overlong and padded out but still quite enjoyed it. Didn't really identify with any of the characters but it was intriguing.

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mrs margaret knight

An interesting book teeming with life, love and friendship set in Florence and London

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 March 2022

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A beautiful story of a younger man and an older woman, an art historian, meeting during the war in Florence and all the friendships and love that make a life.

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Julie Fleming

Each chapter was like a mini portrait

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 April 2022

Verified Purchase

I took the title to be a description and saw each chapter as a mini portrait painted with words so engaging that I thought I was their. Timeless beauty brought to life with love.

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