Keeping the World Away - Softcover

"Forster's style is easy and unpretentious. In a brief paragraph she can create a character we care about, a story we long to see resolved" (Sue Gaisford Independent on Sunday)

"Few authors share Margaret Forster's extraordinary ability to transform the ordinary day-to-day activities of unremarkable people into compelling fiction" (Daily Mail)

"A fine novel... an inspired reflection on the redemptive potential of art" (Mail on Sunday)

"The characters are fully developed and differentiated...there is harrowing emotional insight; it also contains elements of real comedy" (Matthew Dennison The Times)

"Her historical skills are, as always, matched by her marvellous empathy... A finely crafted novel" (Sunday Times)

Lost, found, stolen, strayed, sold, fought over... This engrossing, beautifully crafted novel follows the fictional adventures, over a hundred years, of an early 20th-century painting and the women whose lives it touches.

It opens with bold, passionate Gwen, struggling to be an artist, leaving for Paris where she becomes Rodin's lover and paints a small, intimate picture of a quiet corner of her attic room.

Then there's Charlotte, a dreamy intellectual Edwardian girl, and Stella, Lucasta, Ailsa and finally young Gillian, who share an unspoken desire to have for themselves a tranquil golden place like that in the painting.

Quintessential Forster, this is a novel about women's lives, about what it means and what it costs to be both a woman and an artist, and an unusual, compelling look at a beautiful painting and its imagined afterlife.