"Alison (The Sisters Antipodes) serves up an elegant meditation on aging, art, and nature, inspired by a famous villa in the French Riviera.... The star of the show is the seascape, the power and beauty of which Alison depicts in lyrical prose.... Readers are in for a treat." -- Publishers Weekly "The novel explores the characters and lifelong achievements of both figures: he protean, domineering, and unrepentant; she sensual, committed, enduring. Looping, impressionistic, and atmospheric, narrated in retrospect from both characters points of view, the book offers more psychology than plot, but does so persuasively. A remarkable gender parable filtered through a sophisticated imagination." -- Kirkus Reviews "The latest novel from Alison...is itself a kind of spiral...aside from the historical anecdote itself (once described as an act of naked phallocracy), the most interesting aspect of the book is the way Alison represents these two different consciousnesses on the pagetheir slipstream thoughts, both recursive and immediate, but each distinct, pinning their bodies in space." -- Literary Hub "[ A] concentrated tale of an epic duel between two temperamentally opposite artists.... In prose, by turns, as exquisite as Eileens creation and as seething as Le Grands lust, Alison incisively evokes artistic genius and angst, while infusing a historic scandal with profound heartache and resolve." -- Booklist "In this extraordinary novel, which somehow manages to be both lush and spare, Jane Alison depicts two artists near the ends of their lives, slowly converging on the exquisite villa one has made, and each has loved. Watching Eileen and Le G spiral down into the past and embrace the future, I, too, was transported to the shores of the Mediterranean: light, water, rocks, a gleaming building. Alison writes like no one else." -- Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven "In this nimble, atmospheric novel, two artists are drawn together and must reckon with their distinct creative hungers, the landscapes that shape and haunt, and the grace and the wound of the passage of time. Villa E is a work of tremendous psychological intricacy and physical beauty. Jane Alison writes sentences that are as hypnotic and lyric as the sea." -- Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise "Villa E is an irresistible tale of beauty, obsession and hubris. Jane Alisons portrait of Le Corbusier as a master builder reduced to vandalism by envy is complex and powerful." -- Nancy Horan, author of Loving Frank
