DESCRIPTION
Winner of the 2025
Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize
Longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction
The Artist & the Feast is a captivating novel of love, art, food, desire & thwarted ambition, which builds propulsively over one scorching French summer in 1920s Provence.
During a scorching summer in 1920s Provence, a young journalist, Joseph Adelaide, turns up at the farmhouse of reclusive artist Edouard Tartuffe, hoping to write an article about him. There, he meets Ettie, Tartuffe’s niece, who appears to do everything for her uncle—from cooking & cleaning to catering to his maniacal moods. Joseph is beguiled by where he finds himself, not just by this foreign place or Tartuffe himself, but by Ettie, who watches everything so quietly from the periphery. Both Joseph and Ettie carry scars from their pasts & it’s as they get to know each other that they start to lay bare those scars to themselves & to each other.
As the summer wears on and as new ideas & passions are explored, Joseph, Ettie, & Tartuffe are propelled toward a finale that reveals long-held secrets & sets the world on fire.
Fans of Sarah Winman’s Still Life and Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife will be enchanted by this compelling novel. °°°
Lucy Steeds is a novelist & a graduate of the Faber Academy & the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. She has a BA in English Literature & a Masters in World Literatures from the University of Oxford. She has lived in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Singapore. The Artist & the Feast is her first novel.
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