This is a masterpiece, an enchanting tale following the fortunes and misfortunes of the Rosso family on the Island of Murano. Close to Venice and famous for the history of beautiful glassmaking.
And very cleverly the author has centred the story over 600 years through the skimming of a stone whilst concentrating on the same characters. It makes for a fascinating read.
Orsola is an an anomaly on Murano in the times of the Venetian Renaissance, its expected that the males in the family will follow in their Fathers footsteps and become the Maestro but Orsola has her own dreams and wants more for herself than washing cleaning and cooking for the family.
I was totally engrossed in the novel, the characters were well formed, interspersed with real characters Casanova and Josephine Bonaparte to name a couple. The colourful description of Venice itself also brought it to life

'When you mess around with time as I have here, things can go a little wobbly,' says Tracey Chevalier, in the notes at the end of this book. She has played with time, making the lifetime of her main character, Orsola, run in parallel to centuries of the life of Venice. This sounds as if it will not work but, amazingly, it does.

A beautiful piece of writing, centered on Murano, the home of Venetian glass and the life of one demanding woman. She learns to make glass (beads not the blown glass work of the men of her family) and make her way in the world of Venice.

At the same time, or maybe not the same time, Venice rises, becomes a magnificent trading capital, declines, transforms and becomes the Venice we know today.

That's a pretty clever plot device which only feels incongruous at a couple of points, demanding that the reader get to grips with two timeliness working together.

The writing about glass making is wonderful and reflects the usual, careful research. Thank you for taking me on a journey through time, with glass.
Recommended.

My Bookish Thoughts 💬
"The Glassmaker" was a fascinating journey through the glass-making ages in Murano and Venice, spanning from the late 1400s to the present day, with a particular focus on women's contributions to this art. It captivated and beguiled me from the start.

We follow Orsola and her glass-making family through the centuries, witnessing her struggles as a woman in the trade, striving to keep her large family fed and clothed in a competitive market, and enduring various plagues that brought back memories of our own recent pandemic.

Though I never quite understood why Chevalier made time flow differently for the glassmakers, it was masterfully done, and I just went with it. The streets of Murano and Venice, the art of glass-making, and the relationships in the family and with colleagues, other makers, and merchants are beautifully depicted. I felt as though I was in the sweltering workshops, watching the molten glass flow and take form.

I adored the references Chevalier makes to time skimming like a stone across the water at each change in era:
"If you skim a flat stone skillfully across water, it will touch down many times, in long or short intervals as it lands. With that image in mind, now replace water with time."

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. While "The Girl With a Pearl Earring" still holds a special place in my heart, I highly recommend this captivating journey through glass making from one of my favorite historical fiction writers.

We have a glass center where you can watch glass being blown, not far from Newcastle. I've only been once, "The Glass Maker" has me craving to watch these incredible artists at work again.

🙏🏼Thank you Netgalley Harper Fiction, Harper Collins UK and Tracy Chevalier for gifting me a digital proof copy in return for my honest review.

I really enjoyed this book. I enjoyed the historical time frame, going back to the fifteenth century with the history and art of glassmaking. Like many I have been fascinated by Murano glass and have gazed for ages admiring its beauty. Now I feel I can be part of it.
Other books I have read by Tracy Chevalier have so much depth and always make me feel she is answering queries and questions I have and they get me to look deeper into things.
This novel is about a girl called Orsola who is gifted in glassmaking and it takes over her life, when that shouldn't happen.
I'll be looking at Murano glass with different thoughts now.

Tracy Chevalier has written a wonderful book about the glassmakers of Murano. Spanning 500 years but using the same characters is a good device to ensure a good flow as the time periods change. Orsolo is an interesting character with a large family. The descriptions of working with glass are interesting and clearly described. I really enjoyed the way that the history of the different periods was included to set the scene. Another best seller, I think.

I was excited to read this as soon as possible, being a huge fan of 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' and 'A Single Thread', I love the setting and the intricacies in this story, it's very much Chevalier's style. This is a brilliant read for fans of historical fiction who want to be transported to Italy.

Another beautiful book from Tracy Chevalier. As with many of her previous books I would love to see an illustrated version of The Glassmaker. The book is set in Murano and nearby Venice and centres around the Rosso family, glassmakers in Murano. From the outset Chevalier tells us that time progresses differently in Murano: " If you skim a flat stone skillfully across water, it will touch down many times, in long or short intervals as it lands. With that image in mind now replace water with time. " Thus we experience nearly 540 years of Muranesi /Venetian history through the eyes of the main protagonist Orsola and 'those that matter to her'. I thought this clever device worked really well so that without introducing too many new characters we learned the impact of plagues, war, flooding, tourism and trade changes on the glass industry and the lives of the people of the area. The Rosso family, their usual merchant, and a local gondolier were some of the characters used to highlight aspects of history and also of attitudes to diversity of class, race, gender and (dis)ability. I really appreciated reading about the production and marketing of glass over the centuries though before reading this very well researched book I could not have imagined finding this topic so interesting! I have already recommended this stunning historical fidtion to many friends and family. Thank you to The Borough Press for an ARC of this title.

I was interested in this because of the setting, and it seemed like an fascinating subject: a woman breaking into the glassmaking guild in Renaissance Venice. Well, not strictly Venice: Murano, one of the other islands in the Lagoon, where glassmakers are confined because of the danger represented by their furnaces. Orsola Rosso is determined and unconventional, and when she sees another woman, in a rival glassmaking family, who has agency and authority, she wants it for herself.

And that’s the story: a girl who wants to live her own life – and to love who she wants to love – becomes a woman who learns “lampwork”, which is the art of making colourful glass beads using a tallow lamp and a foot pumped bellows. This is not a subject I was familiar with, and it was interesting to learn about. I even watched a couple of YouTube videos of people using modern day equipment to make beads. Clearly, the author undertook a great deal of research.

The setting is vividly described, and the language of the novel is English interspersed with Venetian and Italian words (there is a glossary at the end).

But that’s not the whole story. The central conceit is that “time flows differently here”, and the image is of a stone skipping across the lagoon. So we start in 1486, but we don’t stay there. Each chapter skips a century or so, and we find ourselves in the Venice of different eras. We survive plagues, wars, and technological change. Various historical characters make appearances and the characters skip through time in the eternal city, which changes but doesn’t change in its essentials because it is not terrafirma. 

Possible spoilers below

But I’m not sure it really works. The “eternal” part of the eternal city turns out to be Orsola and the people she loves. So the historical novel borrows elements of fantasy or science fiction, as this woman glassmaker and her friends and family live on and the city changes around them. Time flows differently, yes, so a hundred years pass and Orsola is no older. Except she is, a little bit. She might be eight years, ten years, further down her personal road. She becomes a middle-aged woman, then an older woman. In science fiction terms, the novel is using relativistic time, with Venice as a ship that travels near light-speed, creating time dilation effects. In fantasy terms, it is as if she made a wish: but be careful what you wish for.

As I said, I’m not sure this mix of genres works. I think at the end the novel reaches for an emotional catharsis which doesn’t quite come across, because the time conceit creates a distancing effect. In the end, an interesting experiment that is certainly intriguing but which left me a bit cold.

A family facing tragedies and disappointments is followed over centuries in this engaging and atmospheric narrative. Letting the characters 'age' over the course of the history is a clever device to allow a deeper resonance with their hopes and dreams.
Part historical fiction, part travelogue, part family drama, definitely a book that will delight many readers.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book.

Thanks to HarperCollins UK and Netgalley for a review copy of this novel. Tracy Chevalier’s ability to create stunning historical novels has been well known since her wonderful offering of ‘The Girl With the Pearl Earring’. She’s covered many periods in her novels and different countries and this time she’s settled on the glassmaking community of Murano in Italy, though to fix a time period would be to miss one of the points of this novel.

The novel’s window to view the glass making community is Orsolo, who is part of a moderately successful family of glassmakers, until her father dies suddenly and the family is left with two sons to carry the business forth. The oldest is temperamental, given to fits of rages and bouts of drinking, whose skill is not up to his dreams of success. The other one is better skilled but shy and unable to take the lead. As the business continues to fail, Orsolo’s mother takes desperate measures and sends the boldly ambitious young Orsolo to ask a famous female glassmaker for help. The woman’s fame is not only for her skill but for the fact that she was the only female making glass because it wasn’t deemed a fit occupation for a woman. But Orsolo is curious and clever and she quickly grabs onto the woman’s practical advice for her to make glass beads. That piece of advice sets Orsolo on a path to become an integral part of the family’s glassmaking business and sees the fate of the glassmakers as time passes slowly in the community while outside decades and centuries pass. Murano suffers through plague and hardship, the decline of their prominence as the rest of Europe set up their own workshops and produce glass of lesser quality but a cheaper price. Orsolo’s personal life also suffers and endures and finds, love and joy as well.

Through Orsolo and her family the reader sees the fate of the glassmaker’s craft over time and through that story can understand the journey of many crafts and manufacturers that are part of and ever widening market as technologies and desires change among the global populace. It’s a lesson for today, told in a structure that is unusual and may not be entirely to everyone’s satisfaction if they’re looking for a deeply immersive tale centred around one time period. Nevertheless there is a real sense of place in which richly drawn characters inhabit. The relationships created are real and heartfelt and there is no doubting the veracity of the various processes in glassmaking that result in a very beautifully crafted novel that is a credit to Chevalier.

Once again Tracy Chevalier has transcended time. She brings us through the ages, the epochs, and changes of Venice and in particular Murano. It’s 1486 and our main character, Orsolo Rosso, is a young girl in a family of glassmiths. Through Orsolo we experience the sounds, the scents, the foods, the people and traditions of the times. We learn of the competition between houses, the reputations and secrets of the craft.

In the Glassmaker Chevalier suspends time. She writes: “If you skim a flat stone skillfully across water, it will touch down many times, in long or short intervals as it lands. With that image in mind, now replace water with time”. And she does.

Time skims across the ages for Venice, and in an odd way for Orsolo as well as we begin with her as a young girl in the 1400s yet the book ends with her in her 60s in our modern times. During those years we experience Venice through the history of years, of plagues, war, Napoleon, trade. Confusing? Maybe. Does it work? For me, yes it does. Glassmaking is a timeless art.

One thing I enjoy in Chevalier’s work of historical fiction is the details, some so large, some so minute but ever important in transporting us and our imaginations until we are there experiencing absolutely everything. If you enjoy detailed historical fiction with strongly defined characters you will enjoy this book.

Thank you to Harper Collins UK and NetGalley for an ARC in return for an honest and unbiased review.

I loved this book.

Such a rich tapestry, woven together beautifully. I have never been to Venice or Murano, but now I’m longing to go and walk in the footsteps of Orsola Rosso.

The concept of the same characters moving through the history of Venice and Murano and the glass making industry is superbly executed. I don’t know how it works so well, it just does.

Never did I question how Orsola could travel through time like the skip of a stone across water. She is there in the 1400s with the Rosso family and still there in 2020s living through the COVID pandemic. Time sweeps through plague and wars and back to plague.

She is every woman, of every time.

I felt her anguish and her joy. I felt her longing and her desperation. I looked forward to the appearance of dolphins. Oh the dolphins.

Beautiful book, beautifully written.

This is a disarmingly ambitious novel. It spans five centuries of a Murano glass-making family through the eyes of a barely ageing Orsola, allowing us to follow the evolution of attitudes to women, relationships and work set against the backdrop of historical upheavals from the plague, Napoleon's arrival and two world wars up to the recent trials of Covid and global climate effects.

Although rather slow to get moving at first, once we are engaged in Orsola's life and troubles, the plot carries us along in a variety of different times and challenges, keen to discover how Orsola and the cast of accompanying characters around her overcome them. Because they follow her through the centuries with relative age gaps and relationships, we don't have to learn their backstories at each reincarnation, and what might have become an unwieldy amount of characters and situations is turned to advantage as a kind of shorthand with an ongoing continuity.

The novel has a very strong sense of place in its snippets of Italian, with glossary at the end, if needed, though I found it unnecessary as they flowed seamlessly to give a flavour of the language and emotions. It gives a real sense of the glass-making industry through history and its importance in the Venetian setting.

I really enjoyed the development of the main characters over the cultural and societal changes through the ages, and the poignant yet unsentimental handling of the ending. A fascinating and innovative book, well worth the time taken to assimilate the unusual timeline.

A fascinating well written book with an absorbing story but the time line really rather confused me. But I still definitely recommend it

A fascinating insight into the life of a city and a family over the course of 500 years. Whilst the city is ever-changing, the family at its core remains more or less constant over time - a great way to show the impact on individuals of war, sickness, economic changes and modernity. Packed with detail around glassmaking and scattered with colourful Venetian/Italian phrases it won’t be long before the reader becomes proficient in cursing and is ready to turn their hand to glassmaking!

The story proceeds at a steady pace - but not in a negative way - as the Rosso family adapts to changes, with Orsola tentatively, over time, carving out a new pathway for herself.

I like the ‘skimming’ technique however some of those jumps could have been executed a little faster in my opinion. The glass dolphins piqued my interest throughout and I was interested to see how that thread would pan out (I was, in truth, a little disappointed on this score.)

A worthy read.

Another fantastic book from Tracy Chevalier. A history of glassmaking in Murano through the eyes and lives of the Rosso family . It very cleverly and seamlessly travels through the centuries with the same characters slowly aging and is entirely believable. It shows aspects of Venice that the tourist will never see and shows through time how it changes. The Rosso family draw the reader into the lives of the glassmaking family and give life to a fascinating area. Highly recommended it is the best book I have read this year.
Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read and give an honest review.

Love, love, love! For the full review go to https://www.tumblr.com/joebloggshere/754934251239161856/joe-bloggs-blogs-booksbooksfood-anything

4.0-4.5. Stars
With thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the arc.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The story of Orsola Rosso and her family of glassmakers on the island of Murano near Venice, this is an engaging and fascinating work of historical fiction. Unlike most historical family sagas Chevalier takes the unusual step of not treating this as a multigenerational story, but rather repeatedly picks up the same group of characters and drops them in different time frames of Venetian history - with the characters ageing only a little with each displacement even if several decades may have elapsed between one segment of the story and the next. This technique works particularly well in exploring what women could/can achieve within the restrictions they have to live under in different periods.
Chevalier has obviously done a lot of research for this book and manages to make the techniques and history of glassblowing a lot more interesting than I ever thought it could be :).

I very much enjoyed this novel.
I remember enjoying The Girl in the Pearl Earring quite awhile ago so when I saw this book on NetGalley UK, I requested it and it quickly climbed up to the top of my to be read list
The novel follows the life of a young girl initially in 1400s Moreno in Venice where she is born into a family of glassmakers. When her father dies suddenly after an accident the family business starts to struggle and in order to support her family she learns to make glass beads.
I enjoyed the sections of the novel set in the glassmaking industry as the processes were interesting and the story highly Visual.
The historical elements seemed real and added a lot to the
I also enjoyed the way the family relationships were described as again this felt real and relatable.
There is an additional element in the story in that in the novel time moves at a different speed on the island of Moreno to the rest of the world. In this way, the characters are able to live through what is several centuries of life in the real world. The characters start at the beginning of glass production and live through world wars to modern times.
The similarities between the section set within plague times and our modern coronavirus pandemic were interesting.

The author is a master storyteller your quickly immersed in the story and the book is a thoroughly enjoyable Non put down Read.

I was initially in two minds about the time skipping element as it felt very peripheral to the Story and I was not not sure what it added . however as I read the magical reality element began to make more sense as the author was able to pull up parallels between lives in different time periods in a way that she wouldn’t have been able to do if the novel has been primarily sat one time.
I’m sure this will be a very popular novel. I’d be very surprised if the television and cinema rights were not taken up quickly, we all enjoy watching on the television reality programs and it would be lovely to see it in the background of a film.
I read an early copy of the novel on NetGalley UK. The book is published on the 12th of September 2024 by Harper Collins UK, Harper fiction.
This will appear on NetGalley, Goodreads and my book blog bionicSarahSbooks.wordpress.com. After publication it will also appear on Amazon UK.

I thank Net Galley and HarperCollins UK, HarperFiction for providing me with an ARC copy of this book which I freely chose to review.
I have read and enjoyed other novels by Tracy Chevalier, and most people will be familiar with some of the titles of her books, or perhaps a popular movie adaptation of one of her books.
One of the things she excels at, judging by the books I’ve read so far, is recreating not only a historical period, but also a particular craft, vocation, or endeavour, using as a guide for the readers a gifted individual (sometimes well-known in its circle and based on a real character, sometimes anonymous and fictitious) whom we accompany in their discoveries, skill development, and craftsmanship. I am always surprised at becoming enthralled by the adventures of a protagonist who spends a lot of time doing something I’d never considered interesting before (or I might have enjoyed the finished product but never given a second thought to how it is made).
Here, Chevalier uses an interesting device to cover a very long period in the history of glassmaking in Murano, a small island very close to Venice, where the population specialised in glassmaking for centuries (and to a far lesser extent, still does). She introduces us to the Rosso family, a Murano glass-making family, in 1486, and we meet Orsola, the nine-year-old daughter of the family. Rather than follow the many generations of her family up to the present, the author uses what she calls “Venetian time, alla Veneziana” and asks readers to imagine it as the skipping of a stone over the surface of the water, but, rather than water it is time we skip over. What this means is that we follow the story of this family through the centuries, but although they age (and yes, some of them die as well), they do so at a much slower pace than the rest of the world, and so do those they are in contact with. The bigger world around them moves with the times, though, but the young girl we meet at the beginning of the novel, in the XV century, is now, in the XXI century, only in her late sixties, so you can work out the speed of time for her. The author explains how this works at the beginning, and if you think you can accept that and go along with the device, I assure you that you will enjoy the novel. I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it, at first, but I didn’t find it as jarring as I imagined, I became accustomed to it pretty soon, and I loved the book.
Using this framework means that we can see how things evolved without having to meet a huge number of characters (of course, the family gets bigger, and new generations appear, but it is much more manageable than it would have been otherwise), and we also have more time to get to truly know the characters (especially Orsola), and see the way the historical changes impacted on them, a family of artisans, skilled but not the most famous or best regarded. This is not history told from the point of view of the rich and powerful, of kings and politicians. More importantly, Orsola’s perspective is quite different from that of her brother (the “maestro” of the family), and readers get to learn much about a woman’s lot in life then, her limited choices, and the way some of them got to create a niche for themselves (like Orsola, who learns to make glass beads) even if their efforts were dismissed by the men in the family.
We see glimpses of History at large: some events take a big toll on the Rosso family and their neighbours and competitors (the plague, the arrival of Napoleon, the period of Austrian Rule, the floods in Venice, WWI and II, COVID), while others have little impact on their fairly isolated lives. Some true historical figures make a fleeting appearance as well (Josephine Bonaparte, although we don’t meet her in person; Casanova, and a very interesting marchioness) but their lives, like those of the many tourists that come and visit, play no important role in the story when all is said and done. The author includes a section of acknowledgements with a bibliography (basic and in more detail) for readers interested in learning more, and she also details some of her research process, as well as mentions the real characters that make it into the story (and those who are inventions), and the sources of inspiration for some of the others, including Domenego, a slave gondolier who becomes good friends with Orsola and Antonio (Orsola’s love interest, but I don’t want to go into too much detail. Read the story if you want to know more).
The love most of the characters feel for glassmaking seems intertwined with their love for Murano. Some of the funniest (and most moving) scenes were those in which we see Orsola visiting Venice for the first time or going to Terra Ferma (the world beyond Venice, not a place where you could move by gondola or a water vessel of some sort). Let’s say she’s less than enamoured with horses and their manure on her first visit.
The story is told in the third person and, as mentioned, this is Orsola’s story, and her family’s, because she can’t imagine a life without them, without Murano, and glass. She is a wonderful character, full of energy and determination, but not a woman who strays away from her role. She does not like many aspects of it, and she struggles against what she perceives as the unfairness of her situation (she craves the admiration of her older brother, Marco, who ends up being the man of the family and the maestro of the glass factory, but they are always fighting, and he dismisses her efforts), but she mostly defers to tradition or tries to get her way by allying herself with other women in the family: Laura, the wonderful mother of the family; Monica, her brother’s second wife (and one of my favourite characters); women from other glass families (like Maria Barovier and her cousin, who guide and teach Orsola how to make beads); Luciana, a Venetian woman who always speaks her mind and is disliked for it; the daughter of the German merchant they make business with, Klara, and many more. The characters are well-defined, feel true, and become almost a part of our family by the end of the novel. Readers get to know better the older generation, but that is as it should be, I am sure I’ll miss Orsola and the family Rosso and I’ll have them on my thoughts for a long time.
I’ve already said I enjoyed the novel. In case you are worried, I liked the ending as well. We spend most of the story wondering if something will happen or not. Of course, I won’t tell you what happened, but I think the ending fits the novel well, and it made me smile. As warnings go, there are sad events in the story, of course, although nothing beyond what would be expected from a historical novel covering such a big stretch of time. There are swear words galore (it seems gondoliers, in the past at least, used choice language with their kind, and they had quite an imagination!), but those are in Italian/Venetian. There are also plenty of words in Italian (and some in the Venetian dialect); most of them are easy to work out from the context, and in other cases, they tend to be explained within the text, at least the first time they appear. There is also a Glossary at the end for those who prefer to know exactly what every word means. I only had access to an ARC copy, so I am unsure if there might be a direct link to the definitions of the terms in the glossary for those who access the final version. Be prewarned, though: insults are also translated, so be careful what you check if you prefer to avoid that kind of language.
This is a great historical novel, though it requires readers to engage in the way the author has chosen to adapt the passing of time, and it is a beautiful book about Murano, glassmaking, and what life has been like for women living in that region and for glassmaking families from Murano and Venice over the years. It is an ambitious book, and it covers over five centuries, but it remains focused on a woman and her family, and that is what makes it so engaging and enjoyable. Totally recommended.