A collection of vivid short stories on the theme of images of women reading. One of the cover review quotes compared this to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and it is indeed another impressionistic journey through time, made up of diverse stories told from very diverse viewpoints. In both books, each story is individually powerful, but they are enhanced by the many subtle echoes creating resonances between the tales.The two stories that had the greatest impact for me were both about relationships between women: one about an 18th century lady mourning her lover and the completion of her posthumous portrait, and the other in which a pair of 19th century twins meet after a long period apart following the breakup of their partnership as celebrity mediums.
The only one that lost me slightly at the time, although strangely it seems to have grown on me in memory, was one set in a dystopian future characterised by almost total virtualisation and disengagement from direct experience. In a flirtation with meta narrative that seemed a little out of keeping with the naturalistic tone of the rest of the book, this story features a 'Sibil' that allows people to engage with a series of artworks via an immersive experience that conveys the (or at least, 'a') story behind the image. I thoroughly enjoyed this book but this last story did make me uncomfortably aware that I had not seen any of the images that inspired it...
