Norman Ollestad - French Girl with Mother (Corte Madera)

French Girl with Mother is a provocative, propulsive thriller that marries the spirit of James Salter with a hint of Patricia Highsmith and the velocity of The Art Forger.

Nathan is a young artist traveling across Europe in search of the emotional fire that has been missing from his work. He’s been deemed by his mentors and critics as technically skillful but uninspired —criticisms he fears to be true. On a Paris street, he witnesses the volatile breakup of a young French woman and her beau. Nathan pursues a meeting with the woman and it very quickly becomes evident that her provocative charisma and scathing beauty just may conjure the electricity he has been seeking for his work. So when the woman invites him to her parents' crumbling, centuries-old chateau in the country to allow him to sketch her, he accepts, knowing that this proposition is both ill advised and thrilling.

Once enveloped by this isolated estate, a door opens to a world Nathan is not prepared for. The arrival of the young woman’s family—her mother, a volatile, voracious former ballerina, her father, a mysterious businessman with secrets of his own, and her uncle, who might be trafficking in art forgeries.

Norman Ollestad is the author of the 2009 bestseller Crazy For The Storm: A Memoir Of Survival. Ollestad's writing has received extraordinary praise from The New York Times to Entertainment Weekly, and has won admiration from esteemed voices including Russell Banks, Jim Harrison, Susan Cheever, and Carolyn See, and invited comparisons to Tobias Wolff and Jon Krakauer.

 

Location: 

51 Tamal Vista Blvd
Corte Madera, CA 94925
French Girl with Mother: A Novel By Norman Ollestad Cover Image
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ISBN: 9781619027848
Published: Counterpoint - October 11th, 2016