Lisa Rochon – författare

For readers of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, The Paris Library and The Paris Bookseller, a story of love, betrayal and sacrifice. In wartime Paris, a woman is entrusted with saving the Mona Lisa during the Nazi occupation - until her first love walks back into her life now wearing the uniform of the enemy.She feels the weight of her responsibility, the weight of her secret. With bitter hands, she wraps up the portrait, closes the case and clicks the latches in place.1910: Eighteen-year-old Mathilde has escaped her lonely provincial childhood to become a painter in Montmartre. Moving in bohemian circles, she models for Picasso and lives hedonistically amongst the artists, writers and intellectuals of Paris. But when the Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre, and a number of Mathilde's friends and lovers become suspects, life will never be the same again.1940: As the enemy marches into Paris, Mathilde, now an archivist at the Louvre, is tasked with the evacuation of hundreds of priceless masterpieces to the Château de Chambord. With her she carries a secret - the Mona Lisa is now under her sole protection, safe from looters. Nobody must discover its whereabouts. But when a face from her past arrives at the château, dressed in Nazi uniform, Mathilde finds herself agonisingly torn between love and duty . . .

For readers of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, The Paris Library and The Paris Bookseller, a story of love, betrayal and sacrifice. In wartime Paris, a woman is entrusted with saving the Mona Lisa during the Nazi occupation - until her first love walks back into her life now wearing the uniform of the enemy.She feels the weight of her responsibility, the weight of her secret. With bitter hands, she wraps up the portrait, closes the case and clicks the latches in place.1910: Eighteen-year-old Mathilde has escaped her lonely provincial childhood to become a painter in Montmartre. Moving in bohemian circles, she models for Picasso and lives hedonistically amongst the artists, writers and intellectuals of Paris. But when the Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre, and a number of Mathilde's friends and lovers become suspects, life will never be the same again.1940: As the enemy marches into Paris, Mathilde, now an archivist at the Louvre, is tasked with the evacuation of hundreds of priceless masterpieces to the Ch teau de Chambord. With her she carries a secret - the Mona Lisa is now under her sole protection, safe from looters. Nobody must discover its whereabouts. But when a face from her past arrives at the ch teau, dressed in Nazi uniform, Mathilde finds herself agonisingly torn between love and duty . . .

A novel of beauty and inspiration set in Renaissance Florence about a young and defiant female artist searching for her mother

Florence, 1500—a city that glitters with wealth and artistic genius is also a place of fierce political intrigue, walled off from the unrest in the surrounding Tuscan countryside. In this moment, a peasant girl finds herself alone after her father is killed and her mother disappears. Young Beatrice must dare to enter the city to sell her family’s olive oil in order to survive, but also to search the streets and opium dens for her missing, grieving mother. 

Walking barefoot from her outlying village, Beatrice is given grudging permission to pass through the city gates to sell olive oil to the artists—Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli—who toil to elevate the status of the Florentine Republic. Lonely yet defiant, the peasant girl draws on the stone walls of Florence in secret as a way to express her pain. While desperately searching the city for her mother, Beatrice befriends the upstart Michelangelo as he struggles to sculpt the David. She also comes to know a cloth merchant’s wife who is having her portrait painted by the aging Leonardo da Vinci, renowned through the land as Master of the Arts. Bonds deepen even while Michelangelo and Leonardo are pitted against each other. 

Set during five epic years in the early 1500s when Florence was rebranding itself through its creative geniuses, Tuscan Daughter reveals the humanity and struggles of a young woman longing to find the only family she has left and be an artist in her own right, and the way she influences the artistic masters of the time to stake everything on the power of beauty to transform and heal.