It’s a romantic vision, to be sure - and one that unravels rather quickly. From young artist starving in a cold rented room she’ll suddenly be fed and warm. Through Yvette, the life model at her class and a fellow student, she’s introduced to a part-time job - where, in exchange for acting as a companion to a young woman for the winter, she’ll get room, board, some cash and the chance to continue at art school. She’s drawn deftly and complexly - partly a middle-class English woman who wants respectability above all and is willing to go hungry for it partly a young woman who knows her own mind and will do whatever is necessary to gain the training to make a living for herself as an artist.

As with many of the characters in the book, there is more to her than meets the eye. The story starts with a “life-class in progress.” English woman Maud Heighton arrives in Paris to study art in the early years of the 20th century.

It’s a well-researched, well-paced historical thriller that marries the worlds of art, early feminism and Paris. If The Paris Winter is any indication, 2013 should carry on the string of good years. She went on to write a trilogy of thrillers and was shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award 2011 and the CWA Dagger in the Library Award 2012. She won the Telegraph’s First Thousand Words of a Novel contest - which became her first book, Instruments of Darkness. Robertson’s first literary efforts have made a splash in the U.K. Instead, they are described in detail and we interpret how we are going to visualize the Paris Robertson describes. A catalogue describes these paintings, but the reader never sees them. She uses this literary device: a fictional series of paintings, “Anonymous Treasures from the de Civray Collection” are displayed at the Serpentine Gallery in London. There’s the one near Montmartre near the French Quarter of the rich, the poor and any dozens of social strata in between.Īnd there’s the Paris that existed at the beginning of the 20th century, in 1909: one on the cusp of change for art, for women.įor her fourth novel, The Paris Winter, Britain’s Imogen Robertson creates a Paris she asks, to an extent, the reader to infuse with meaning.

The Paris Winter by Imogen Robertson