De Ferrari, Gabriella

New York. 1990. April 1990. Knopf. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0394551451. 325 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration: Oiseau et Tortue. by Francis Picabia, 1926-27, Gouache on paper. 25 3/4 x 19 3/4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson. keywords: Literature Translated Peru Latin America. FROM THE PUBLISHER - At the center of this novel are two women, mother and daughter, locked together by love and combat. It is 1920. On the Italian Riviera, in an immense white villa high above a threadbare fishing village, lives the only woman who has ever married her way out of the village and into luxury. Dora has carnivorous charm and utter elegance. She is ignorant, imperious, volcanic. and frightening. Swathed in velvets and silks, swooping off to Paris or Monte Carlo on mysterious assignations-Only to return to sit in her near-empty rooms by candlelight-she rules in lonely, widowed splendor over her fading kingdom. The prime target of her tyranny is her daughter Antonia. The young girl is sensitive, imaginative. vulnerable. But - almost unknowingly -she has three allies: her beautiful and self-destructive brother, Marco, to whom she is profoundly connected; an admirer, Arturo (her first and only, met by chance), whose deepening passion for Antonia enrages her mother; and the elderly, formidably worldly Count Mora, whose loyalty to Dora's children as well as to Dora (once-perhaps still-his lover) transcends the barriers of time and place. How Antonia first survives, and then conquers, the emotional wilderness her mother has created-how she ultimately escapes into love, into an extraordinary marriage, into a new world-is told in A CLOUD ON SAND in scene after spellbinding scene. inventory #13862 ISBN: 0394551451.