Villa E

A Novel

By: Jane Alison

Narrated by: Brigid Lohrey

From the author of Meander, Spiral, Explode, an astounding novel inspired by the collision of Irish designer Eileen Gray and famed Swiss architect Le Corbusier.

Along the glittering coast of southern France, a white villa sits atop an earthen terrace-a site of artistic genius, now subject to bitter dispute. Eileen, a new architect known for her elegant chair designs, poured the concrete herself; she built it as a haven for her and her lover, and called it E-1027. When the hulking Le G, a founder of modernist architecture, laid eyes on the house in 1929, he could see his influence in the sleek lines-and he would not be outdone. Impassioned, he took a paintbrush to the clean, white walls . . .

Thirty years later, Eileen has not returned to Villa E and Le G has never left-his summers spent aging in a cabin just feet away. Mining the psyches of two brilliant, complex artists and the extraordinary place that bound them, Jane Alison boldly reimagines a now-legendary act of vandalism into a lushly poetic and mesmerizing novel of power, predation, and obsession.

©2024 Jane Alison (P)2024 Tantor

Stunning

Beautiful language and elegant spiraling of subtle plot: the narcissistic and colonial attitudes of one architect (male) violating another (female) in ways both shocking and yet strangely inevitable (perhaps because the backdrop is Hitler’s brutal invasion of France and the lack of resistance from the French)…sensory evocation is impressive as is the distinct portrayal of the idiosyncratic internal landscapes of the two architects. Stunning!