THE DILETTANTE

Set in the 1930's in the bohemian artistic communities of Paris and London in the early days of the war, the story of Peggy Guggenheim falling in love with the then-unpublished Irish writer Samuel Beckett, who lived in the shadow (and in the service) of his mentor James Joyce. Their affair was brief, but transformative for Peggy, leading her to reject what she saw as the shallow, pointlessness of American society and instead struggled to find an identity for herself and a sense of purpose. 

Peggy eventually finds this through Beckett and in the community of artists and writers she immerses herself in. But they fall out as the Nazis are taking over France.  As a Jewish woman with a massive collection of modern and postmodern art that the Nazis consider degenerate, she flees back to the US.  Her art collection is sent unsecured on a container ship.

When she lands on American soil, she is a different person.  In many ways, she embraces the society mantle she had so violently rejected and uses it to support art for the rest of her life. While the novel is bookended with her life in America, it focuses largely on her time in Europe.

THE DILETTANTE brilliantly captures the personal, emotional drama that Guggenheim endured to emerge as the woman she eventually became known as, along with the world of artists in Europe during the war which gave rise to some of the most important written and visual works of art of the 20^th century. 

Rebecca Godfreyis an award-winning novelist and journalist. Her first novel, The Torn Skirt, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Under the Bridge received one of Canada’s largest literary awards, the British Columbia Award for Canadian Nonfiction, as well as the Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Crime Writing. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and has received fellowships from Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony. In 2016, she edited and curated the multimedia exhibition, Girls In Trees. She teaches writing at Columbia University, and lives with her family in upstate New York.

USKnopf • CanadaKnopf Canada • UKTwo Roads/Hodder