Broken Colors [Paperback]

The author of Einstein's Daughter and Violette's Embrace, Zackheim delivers the epic life of a woman whose art and survival become ever more tightly bound with passing years. With her firebrand parents dead at the close of WWI, Sophie Marks lives out a protracted childhood aesthetics lesson in the pre-WWII English Midlands with her painter grandfather Eli and poet grandmother Claire. At the Slade School of Art in London, Sophie falls for French student Rene; she returns home pregnant and abandoned. Hitler's bombings bring terror and hardship, and a direct hit upon the family's cottage leaves Sophie bereft. Afterward, in a convalescent sanitarium, Sophie's romance with the shell-shocked and disfigured Maj. Hugh Roderick ends in tragedy, but not before the two exchange portraits. Sophie again returns to her barren homestead and undertakes a very complex form of mourning in her grandmother's garden. Over the 200-plus pages of Sophie's next 55 years, Zackheim introduces the novel's major theme of art as a series of interments and disinterments, new ground being broken as old ground is plundered. Her postwar heroine displays ample pluck and depth of feeling in the face of trauma. (Oct.)
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"A profoundly original, beautifully written work, so emotionally accurate that it tears at the heart. I read it without stopping."-Gerald Stern

Sophie Marks' path to artistic and personal fulfillment takes her from World War II England to postwar Paris and the Italian countryside. She leaves Europe in 1967 and spends the next two decades in the American Southwest. Acclaimed at last as an artist, she returns to England to confront the hidden memories of her childhood and test the possibilities of a renewed love, a passion ripened by maturity.

Michele Zackheim is the author of one previous novel, Violette's Embrace, and one work of nonfiction, Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl. Before turning to writing, Zackheim worked as a visual artist and has shown in numerous museums and galleries.