The Figures of Beauty

A young man travels to Paris in 1968, where a series of unlikely events take him to a tiny village in Italy—and the one great love of his life. A marble merchant meets a couple on their honeymoon, introducing them to the sensual beauty of Carrara. An Italian woman arrives in Canada to find the father she never knew. A terrible accident in a marble quarry changes the course of a young boy’s life and, ultimately, sets in motion each of these stories, which Macfarlane masterfully shapes into a magnificent whole.Oliver Hughson falls in love with wild, bohemian Anna over the course of one glorious summer in Italy. Bound by a sense of responsibility to his adoptive parents back home in Canada, however, he leaves her, an act he will regret for the rest of his life. Narrated by the daughter he never knew he had, The Figures of Beauty is a love story of mythic proportions. Through luck, fate and great good fortune, Oliver found the one place and the one woman he should never have left. This is the story of him trying to find his way back.Praise for The Figures of Beauty“The Figures of Beauty is a rich, imaginative novel about art, life and beauty. It’s epic in scale but intimate in tone, with Macfarlane’s prose as crisp and pure as Carrara marble. One of the best novels I’ve read all year.”—Ross King, author of Leonardo and the Last Supper“A beautifully written, complex, and bittersweet story that spans continents and eras. Macfarlane teases his story to the surface as meticulously as his sculptors (Michelangelo, Brancusi) extracted their forms from marble—and always with a vivid sense of place, from a small Ontario community to the hill towns of Carrera.” —Daphne Kalotay, author of Russian Winter and Sight Reading