Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

After the death of her longtime friend and flatmate, retired British history teacher Julia Garnet does something completely out of character: She takes a six-month rental on a modest appartamento in Venice. An atheist, a Communist, and a virgin, Julia finds herself falling beneath the seductive spell of the city's intoxicating beauty and sensual religiosity. She befriends a young Italian boy and English twins who are restoring a fourteenth-century chapel. And she falls in love for the first time in her life with an art dealer named Carlo.

Juxtaposing Julia's journey of self-discovery with the apocryphal tale of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael, Miss Garnet's Angel tells a lyrical, incandescent story of love, loss, miracles, and redemption . . . and of one woman's transformation and epiphany. An international bestseller, it is "novel-writing at its finest and most eloquent . . . splendid . . . the sort of book that effortlessly, like angels, or sunlight on Venice's rippling waterways, casts brightness and beauty into those private and most shadowed recesses of the human heart" (The Christian Science Monitor).

Genres: Fiction, Italy, Book Club, Historical Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Literary Fiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Salley Vickers was born in Liverpool, the home of her mother, and grew up as the child of parents in the British Communist Party. She won a state scholarship to St Paul’s Girl’s School and went on to read English at Newnham College Cambridge.

She has worked, variously, as a cleaner, a dancer, an artist’s model, a teacher of children with special needs, a university teacher of literature, and a psychoanalyst. Her first novel, ‘Miss Garnet’s Angel’, became an international word-of-mouth bestseller. She now writes full time and lectures widely on many subjects, particularly the connections between, art, literature, psychology and religion.

Her principal interests are opera, bird watching, dancing, and poetry. One of her father's favourite poets, W.B.Yeats, was responsible for her name Salley, (the Irish for 'willow') which comes from Yeats’s poem set to music by Benjamin Britten 'Down by the salley gardens'.

Reviews

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

* 3.5 STARS*

I adore Venice, it's quite unique, and somewhat bewitching, so it's not difficult to imagine how strait laced retired British history teacher and virgin, Julia Garnet, succumbs to its magic, and falls head over heels in love for the first time in her life.

Julia kicks back and throws caution to the wind, and that doesn't come easy for her. From her tiny balcony above the canals of Venice, she witnesses life in all its glory - the wonderful architecture, the street artists, the comings and goings of this vibrant magical place, and slowly she becomes a part of it, falling in love with art dealer Carlo, and so begins a 6 month journey of self discovery, redemption and religious mystery.

This is a book about an obsession with an angel, it's about the quietness of life, the stillness that can bring about a powerful force, a celebration of life and independence - it's like the 4th July without the fireworks! Charming and resonating, but it probably leaves you with more questions than answers in the spiritual sense, and actually questions what we think we know about faith.

[Phrynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a quiet, gentle, meditative kind of book, one where you need to sit back and smell the roses rather than race through it to the end. I very much enjoyed watching Miss Garnet, who is a retired school teacher, spinster and virgin, as she discovers there is so much more to life than she has so far found.
She travels to Venice, falls in unrequited love, meets new friends, solves a crime and experiences some good things and some not so good. She probably participates more in life in these few months than in all her previous years.
There is also plenty of religious mysticism, beautiful descriptions of Venice which make you want to go there at once, and a parallel story within the story.
Lots for the reader to enjoy and I am now keen to read more by this author.

[kp · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend recently said to me, "So many things are not worth talking about." He was referring to the quiet power of the understated, and the British have a tradition of novels about the still small voices, and the profound yet ordinary emotions, that sometimes get short shrift amid the fireworks of our soap-opera culture. From Jane Austen E.M Fortsre to Kazuo Ishiguro, these novels remind us of how interior and how subtle much of our emotional experience actually is. In writers like Barbara Pym, Penelope Fitzgerald, Anita Brookner, this experience is tied to people, mostly aging women, who are often discounted by those who've embraced an operatic aesthetic. In Miss Garnet's Angel, Sally Vickers takes a character whom Brookner would have made a tragic shell and gives her a transformation less dramatic but just as beautiful as any undergone by more obviously romantic protagonists. The novel wryly and gently explores the notions of salvation and faith, as well as faithless human love. A modern reader, looking at the flyleaf, might assume the novel to be sentimental. It is not, but it is compassionate, restrained, and quietly hopeful.

[Cynnamon · Rating 2 out of 5]

A story about an English spinster travelling to Venice who develops an overwhelming interest in religious art and Christian myths.

A nicely told and rather quiet story, that did not really meet my interests, but probably very nice for the right target group.

2 stars from my side.
------------------------------------------------

Miss Garnet, ein ältliches, frisch pensioniertes Fräulein und ehemalige Lehrerin begibt sich für ein halbes Jahr nach Venedig, um die dortigen Kirchen und Kunstschätze zu studieren. Auf dieser Reise findet und verliert sie eine Liebe, findet Freunde und verliert sich seltsam tief in religiösen Mythen.
Letztlich gewinnt sie eine völlig neue Perspektive auf ihr gesamtes Leben und ist am Ende viel glücklicher als zuvor.

Der Roman ist ruhig und angenehm erzählt, kreist für meinen Geschmack jedoch viel zu sehr um religiöse Kunst und christliche Mythen, als dass mich die Geschichte mehr als nur marginal interessieren konnte.

Daher kann ich wegen mangelnden Interesses am Thema nur 2 Sterne vergeben.

[Marfita · Rating 2 out of 5]

I went into this with all my warning lights flashing: it's gonna be spiritual (and I'm not), "oh god, there's gonna be romance" (ew); and "she's gonna see angels, isn't she?" This was probably unfair to the author, but that hasn't stopped me before.
Miss Julia Garnet is a rather stupid woman who becomes fascinated by a story from the Apocrypha when she could be enjoying the endless art of Venice. She also has very bad "gay-dar." Vickers tries to interweave these two stories but as the outcome of the older one had already been laid out for the reader, I wished it would just go away. I've read pseudo-biblical novels and actually enjoyed them (The Red Tent by Anita Diamant) because they were saying something interesting on two levels: this is the way it was, this is us looking at it from behind the screen of the laconic biblical version.
In the end, I think this is someone who actually does write better than Dan Brown trying to write something similar to The da Vinci Code or such, but running up against the same problems: the straining of credulity chief among them. While I welcome this in cheezy mystery fiction, I expect something better from this sort of book.
The angel business is telegraphed all over, Miss Garnet (not sure if I can blame the author directly on this) makes a silly error over the usage of "Signore" [no, my dear, they aren't calling God by the homely title of "Mister" - Signore means "lord" and it and mister/master have been watered down to apply to all men:], and the Apocrypha story contains such an egregious ball of lard as: "In your language, if you spell dog backwards ... well, you are not stupid, I guess, or you would not be reading this." So, this Jew in Assyrian exile knows English? Wow, how magical is that.
And I think: really, am I not stupid? Why am I reading this? Because I was ordering "Barbarella" from amazon.com and this would only be another $2.22?

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was too whimsical for me and I abandoned it. It's about an irritable English spinster who goes to Venice when the woman she lives with dies. For it to work it needed a memorable lead character but I found Julia both dull and implausible. She is a retired teacher who didn't like teaching or children; she is an atheist and a former communist but all this felt like irrelevant biography - told but never shown. It's a book that depicts a much kinder world than the one we live in. Julia somehow manages to charm four young people into befriending her within days of arriving in Venice. It's surprising sometimes how seemingly innocuous can be the details which prevent you from suspending disbelief. But why young hippy twins restoring a church would take an interest in a grumpy old woman baffled me. It also baffled me what credentials they had to be restoring a church. Again this is told, not shown, as if the author couldn't be bothered to research the art of restoration. It did though remind me of what a wonderful novel A Month in the Country is - where the author has artful command of the discipline of restoration. This novel becomes even more implausible when the boy twin disappears with one of the panels of the church's inventory. You can't help asking yourself what church would allow a pair of wayward kids with no adult professional supervision to restore a church. The novel now becomes a kind of genteel version of the De Vinci Code. But there wasn't enough reality in the book for me to ever feel engaged. Even Venice is told rather than shown with lots of guide book info but little enlivening detail. A parallel narrative recounts a fictional account of the apocryphal story of Tobit and Tobias which I liked better but not enough to see through to the end. It's a no from me.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Miss Garnet's Angel is the gentle story of Julia Garnet, a retired teacher, and her transformation in old age when she moves to Venice for six months following the death of her life-long friend. Out of her suburban English comfort zone, she allows people, paintings and the place itself to touch her soul for the first time. There's much to like, including Julia Garnet herself, and the Venice backdrop is atmospheric and evocative.

However, having read other Vickers' novels and thus armed with high expectations, for me this fell short. The Story of Tobit, woven alongside the main narrative, seemed like a novelist trying too hard to be clever (pretentious, dare I say) and neither did I quite 'buy' all the characters - the twins, for instance, didn't quite ring true. Plus, it's a minor gripe, but stylistically the excessive exclammation marks seemed at odds with the quiet, measured tone and interrupted the flow. So overall, if you've not read Salley Vickers before, I'd say don't start here. 'The Other Side of You' is a much better, more mature novel. Go for that, I suggest, instead.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

For my full review, visit me at https://mrsbrownsbooks.wordpress.com/...

To be honest, it was the Venice setting that appealed the most to me. Having spent a wonderful weekend there with my husband, I relished in being transported back there once again. Indeed, this book definitely fulfilled my expectations on that front yet, in terms of plot, I was disappointed with my second read by Vickers.

For my full review, visit me at https://mrsbrownsbooks.wordpress.com/...

[Philip Dickinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Miss Garnet's Angel began promisingly. The bereavement of a close friend and the move to Venice seemed like the start of something very exotic. I've been to Venice and read up on some of it's history so I was keen to see what strangeness Salley Vickers would brew up. Dark intrigue and who knows what. The descriptions took me back to that fantastic city and I was always eager to see where Julia would wander next.

I liked the way Salley put Julia's life together and built up a picture of what those relationships were like. I also liked the backstory of Tobias and Tobit and Sara. Unfortunately I don't think the two stories knitted together very well, especially as the modern day plot with Toby and Sarah ended long before the end of the book.

Unfortunately this book is likely to disappear out of my life without leaving a ripple. It failed to move me on any emotional level. There was no one in it whom I particularly liked; Julia herself caused me some annoyance. There was no one to hate and no moments of mild concern, let alone full-on peril. Tobias' wedding night was the only contender and that was over very quickly. I don't understand why the girl Julia met on the train journey back from Devon made such an impact on her. Maybe Julia had something of a spiritual awakening but if she did, I didn't really feel as though she had shared it with me.

I'm not sure I would not have read to the end of this book if it hadn't been a book club book. It was just too bland. It could have been called 'Miss Garnet goes abroad (but not very far) and almost makes a few friends.'

Disappointing. Sorry. One star may be a bit harsh but it's not much more. I don't think it's a bad book but it failed to get a hold of me.

[Peg Lafrance · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book at a used bookstore in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, while on vacation. I thought the subject - Venice, an English spinster, life changes - attractive. But the blurb reviews really recommended it to me. Penelope Fitzgerald, Joanna Trollope, and Anita Brookner all liked it. Atlantic Monthly mentioned similarities to Barbara Pym.

The book incorporates a story from the Apocrypha. It does it subtly, unfolding the biblical tale as the story of Miss Garnet's life blossoms. The characters are complex. Sad and hopeful at the same time.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve honestly lost count of how many times I’ve read this book..four times, maybe five.....there is something about it that appeals to me, and I list it among my all time favourites.

Julia Garnet is a spinster.....a teacher who has dedicated her life to her career, a woman who has never known love, and whose communist leanings and lack of religious belief seem to have prevented her from enjoying many of the things life has to offer.

Her retirement, the loss of a friend, and an unexpected legacy have a polarising effect on her, and quite out of character, she decides to spend six months in Venice, renting a small apartment in this beautiful city.

As Venice works it’s magic on Miss Garnet, she falls in love......with Venice, with its splendid buildings and waterways, with her new life, and, with an enigmatic man she meets by chance.....and with an Angel....

She makes new friends, and meets new, interesting people, including a young man and woman, twins, who are restoring a series of panels depicting the tale of Tobias and the Angel, a story which is told in the Apocrypha, and which holds a strange fascination for Julia.
As the story of Miss Garnets sojourn in Venice unfolds, the story of Tobias and his Angel unfolds alongside, adding a wonderful extra dimension to this book.
Julia Garnet’s life continues to expand as she explores what Venice has to offer, her social life blossoms, and she experiences a spiritual awakening of sorts, as she realises how wonderfully uplifting the religious worship she has shunned for most of her life can be....her life is becoming fuller than it’s ever been.
Unfortunately though, things are not always what they seem, people not always who they at first appeared to be, and Miss Garnet must suffer some setbacks, worries, and doubts......and unravel a few mysteries before she can regain her peace of mind.

For me, this is a brilliantly multilayered story that I will probably read yet again........

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written, but overrated. Leaves a slightly nasty taste (like Waugh's Handful of Dust). The parallels with the story of Tobit probably work better second time round. Even better if you're familiar with Venice, though I didn't notice the map!

[Delia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Julia Garnet is sixty years old, emotionally repressed, sexually inexperienced and has spent her life in almost sacrificial frugality. She is also the amazed heir to her former - even more frugal - housemate's legacy. Harriet seems to have had a secret: a genius for investment! Who knew? Certainly not Julia Garnet.

Both Julia and Harriet were dutifully pro-labour, even deriving a sense of moral superiority - or at least moral purity - from the connection. But beneath the austere surface, Julia Garnet was hungry for adventure, for travel, and, most unexpectedly, for beauty, the latter having been limited to admiring the inherent loveliness of flowers in other people's gardens. Julia was starved for joy and she was shrinking into oblivion when her housemate's sudden death changed everything and brought Julia face to face with with her surprising destiny.

Where would you go if you suddenly had money to travel? France? Egypt? Bora Bora? Miss Garnet chose that most decadent and sensuous of Europe's cities, La Serenissima, Venice. The mere mention of Venice evokes many images in the popular imagination: elaborate Carnevale Masks; extravagant chandeliers and gold leaf interiors; illicit assignations in gondolas; magnificent meals and expensive wines; Murano glass and hand-made shoes. Venice has all of this. And churches. Lots and lots of churches. Miss Garnet was CoE, of course, and like so many of her ilk, suspicious of anything "Romish". Her life was marked by as utter an absence of the voluptuous in terms of spiritual life as it was in terms of daily life. Despite the suspicion and antipathy toward Catholic display, millions of Calvinists seem to feel almost envious of the astounding outpouring of genius and talent that even fairly modest Old World Catholic and Orthodox churches contain. But none amongst them can rival Venice for sheer sensuous indulgence. Despite the ravages of damp and salt, Venice is home to a vast artistic inheritance - one that was about to rock Julia Garnet's world.

The habits of a lifetime are not easy to break and Julia seeks out a fairly basic lodging except for one detail: the balcony that presents to her view the glory of Venice's architecture and that indescribable light that so intrigued artists from da Vinci to Canaletto and beyond. From her tiny perch above the teeming canals, Julia Garnet will dive into a life she could not have imagined. Friends had been few and somewhat cold-blooded in England but from her first day in Venice Julia seemed to attract an amazing number of interesting and talented people and for possibly the first time in her life, she fell in love. Not once but twice. And one of the objects her love was - of all things - an Angel. An Archangel to be more precise. A beautiful androgynous Archangel whose presence seemed to follow her around the floating city. His name was Raphael.

Her other love was Carlo, a charming, worldly man with a vast knowledge of art, especially the artistic treasures resident in his home city. Julia was certainly not looking for love when she ventured out on her first walk along the canal in search of interesting historical landmarks. As a retired teacher of history, Julia had imagined an orderly progress through the history of the city but serendipity entered her life and turned its orderliness on its head.

The mystical and the mundane live cheek by jowl in Venice in an intimacy unmatched anyplace else. Salley Vickers, the author of Miss Garnet's Angel, captures the layered personality of Venice in parallel stories that unfold contrapuntally gradually advancing toward the grand reconciliation between dream and reality, innocence and experience, love and loss.

Venice is a city of Angels but, perhaps more than any, Archangel Raphael is an abiding presence. Identified with healing and with the protection of travellers, he is a fitting avatar for Miss Garnet's adventure and on her first attempt at navigating the complex paths that lead everywhere and nowhere in Venice, she stumbles upon a rather obscure and little known church, the Chiesa San Raffaele. Led by innocent curiosity, she trespasses on an art restoration project - or perhaps I should say a transformation project because conventional, unimaginative Julia Garnet is about to be changed forever.

Beauty does that. Especially when it sneaks up on you. Sensible people, practical people, serious people have little use for Beauty. It's a distraction. It enlarges your senses. Colours suddenly become hypnotic. Sounds that you would ordinarily screen out advance to the front of your consciousness.

Beauty intrigues us much as a brilliant magician does. Can we trust our senses to give us an accurate picture or are we being subtly deceived? What would happen if just for a moment we suspended our disbelief and let ourselves feel wonder? What would it be like not having to understand something intellectually but actually entering into it, becoming part of the story instead of the critic? Level-headed Julia Garnet succumbs to the charming story of Tobias from the Old Testament Book of Tobit told in paint by the renaissance artist Giantonio Guardi and finding new life at the hands of Toby and Sara, the almost-twins and art restorers Julia discovers in the Church of San Raffaele.The story of Tobit, Tobias, Azarias (Raphael in human form), an unpaid debt, a dog, a giant fish, and a beautiful but tragic bride is unlike anything else in the Judaic Old Testament. We find no jealous, narcissistic Jehovah here. Missing are the blood and gore, the stories of deceit and revenge, the anger and judgment of an implacable god. Here we see the other face of the divine: the gentle strength, the patient wisdom and, ultimately, the blinding radiance of pure spirit.

To say more would risk spoiling the experience of Miss Garnet's Angel for potential readers of this little gem of a book. Salley Vickers' mastery of the art of story is fully realized in this novel and those who read it are changed by it.

Fair warning: Miss Garnet's Angel is an irresistible force of nature, a mystery with no solution but many possible answers. At the very least, you will question your assumptions about the possibility of "entertaining Angels unaware", the limits of material existence, and the finality of death. Not bad for one book.

© Delia O' Riordan 2012

[Stephanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

About once or twice a year, I get stuck in a really bad book rut. Nothing appeals to me or manages to pull me in. I carry a book to and from work in my backpack, but never bother to open it throughout the day. I can't concentrate. Usually this is triggered by a really bad reading experience (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, Eva Luna
You wouldn't think that Miss Garnet's Angel would be the book to get me out of my slump. It was definitely not SO GOOD or SO WONDERFUL, but it did keep me engaged (ish. More on this later).

Miss Garnet's Angel is kind of like a fictional precursor to Eat Pray Love. White woman stuck in rut travels to Italy (in this case, Venice) and learns how to eat and connect with both herself and others and experience local "colour" and, like, LIVE. Oh, and there's lots of religious-y things (gotta cover the "Pray" part). Miss Garnet, a confirmed communist and shunner of all things religious, becomes obsessed with the angel Raphael and the story of Tobias and Sara from the Apocrypha. At first, I kind of enjoyed these philosophy-of-religion tangents (and being able to make connections between the story proper and that of Tobias and Sara--presented in alternating chapters), but eventually I tired of it and found much of it rather repetitive. Oh, and then there was the whole cousins-called-twins incest situation. I GET that the modern Toby/Sarah story was supposed to mirror that of Tobias/Sara, but ew. No. No. Up to that point I had forgiven a lot in this book...its sentimentality, its tendency to trigger eyerolls, its obliqueness, but when I got to that plot point I was done.

So, did this book get me out of my rut (even though it was pretty terrible)? Maybe. I hope.

[Tripfiction · Rating 5 out of 5]

An iconic novel of VENICE



I read this novel when it was first published. That was in the year 2000! This is a novel that has really withstood the test of time and it is a book I often suggest to people who are off to Venice. Reading it offers an even greater cinematic experience of the city (is that even possible?). It is a gentle story, told with charm and detail, that carries the reader along at a thoughtful pace. This is the story of Julia, now in retirement, in many ways an unremarkable woman – and yet. She chooses to spend 6 months in Venice, exploring the city and its treasures, gaining a variety of friendships and experiences. As the time passes, she learns to re-evaluate some of her core beliefs and to trawl her deeper soul in quiet contemplation.

Running alongside Julia’s story is the biblical story of Tobias and the Angel. A story of journeying, both physical and personal, as Tobias sets off at his father’s behest, in the company of the Archangel Gabriel. The Chiesa di S Raffaele Arcangel in Venice features in the story (it is off the beaten track, and is best known for the doors depicting The Story of Tobias, attributed to Gianantonio Guardi).

A story that has many levels and now – 20 years down the line – deserves a new generation of readers. It is an iconic novel for #literarywanderlust that will warm your heart.

Enjoy your virtual trip to Venice.

[Dawn F · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a complete surprise to me. I was not acquainted with Salley Vickers before I stood with a friend in a London second hand bookshop last year, the cover and the title catching both of our eye. (Having just watched Good Omens, we were perhaps a bit enthusiastic about angels).

Introspective, gentle and beautiful are words that describe this. The main character Julia Garnet is an elderly lady who has held herself tightly controlled through most of her life, but upon the death of her friend and roommate through the past 30 years she embarks on a journey to Venice, where she is captured by its beauty and magic, and not least the angel Raphael, depicted in paintings and sculptures around the historical city, seems to have a special grasp on her.

As she meets a colorful variety of remarkably different people from herself, Julia slowly comes out of her shell. It’s tender, bittersweet, and startlingly funny at times, especially the modern retelling of Tobit, a story from the Apocrypha featuring the angel Raphael, and whose story is narrated parallel to the main story as Julia reads and learns about it. It find it hard to fully describe how delightful, surprising and moving this book was, quite different from anything I’ve ever read. It won’t be my last Vickers book.

[Tweedledum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Miss Garnet's Angel is a clever and beautiful tale infused with a touch of mysticism and wonder. Miss Garnet is a very rational retired teacher with communist sympathies who late in life discovers that there is far more to life than her narrow outlook. As Miss Garnet's prejudices are gradually swept away she discovers friends in unexpected places and becomes increasingly caught up in the story behind a old painting of Tobias and the Angel.

Sally Vickers has once again woven a story that questions what we think we know about faith and life gently encouraging the reader, like Miss Garnet to draw back the veil of what we are seeing and to look beyond the veil.

[Claude · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am giving up. Somehow, although it started well and takes place in Venice, I cannot really get interested. Every time I do get into Miss Garnet’s story, I have to read about Tobit (not interesting to me at all, cannot understand why it’s written in the first person), so there it is, life is too short. I’m giving up.
As an afterthought, I could have read the end. Why didn’t I even care?
Probably because I’ve liked all the books by Salley Vickers I’ve read and am disappointed.

[Stacey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this book extremely boring. 😴 It took me a long time to finish it. The storyline is all over the place. Unfortunately I will not be reading another Salley Vickers novel. 😒

[Lily Forsythe · Rating 1 out of 5]

What is going on here? Upon finishing this novel I have been left with the uncomfortable feeling that this novel, published surprisingly recently in 2011, endorses pedophilia and incest. Why??? Why would Julia Garnett apparently realize that her would-be-lover is hot for her very young boy Italian pseudo-pupil and not inform the police, or at the very least check up on the boy? Also, I'm pretty sure sleeping with (and then marrying) your cousin was taboo by the late 20th century. Despite these seemingly exciting plot fallacies, this book bored my socks off! (I needed something to read on the subway.) There's this fixation on virginity and she doesn't even lose it in the end and then she dies, what does this mean!? Bad. One star. Can I give no stars? I can handle books following a religious theme if it is critically presented but I found the agenda of this novel too glaringly obvious to stomach. Oh yes and did I mention the writing? Indefatigable!

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

An utter joy, a tale of love in Venice, the timelessness of mankind and the power of symbolism and belief. Want to read it again now I've come to the end. More perfectly, I would like to read it again - in Venice....

[trishtrash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Miss Julia Garnet, spinster and virgin, travels to Venice after the death of her friend Harriet. She discovers more than solace there, something more akin to an awakening. It’s a beautiful premise and is artfully executed, and Venice is the ideal, sumptuous setting for this intriguing mix of stories that Julia’s tale entwines with – my favourite character is the wise and delightful Monsignore Giuseppe, whose presence brings a kindness and affability to the story which I really loved, but while some of the characters fall flat, Julia’s relationship with Venice itself (and the angel Raphael) never does. It is a book that tries to do a lot, but that’s okay because it largely succeeds.

If there’s a significant weakness, it’s that Vicker’s own voice sometimes fails to do justice to the truly fascinating subjects that she explores. There are a couple of chapters of Mr Golightly’s Holiday at the back of my copy and, on reading them, I am left to conclude that I started with precisely the right book of Vicker’s, and need go no further. Without the luminescence of Venice, her prose does not glow, nor really engage. Miss Garnet’s Angel was not a perfect book, but it was very readable and had a strong principle character and great setting, and enough themes and plot meanderings to continue to be worth thinking about once the reader has put it down.

[Natalie Print · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable book, with a rich development of characters, which draws you in to two journeys of exploration and discovery running parallel. Based primarily in the unique setting of Venice, it also paints a picture of the city and highlighted some interesting places to visit on our trip. I was sad to get to the final page!

[Bionic Jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Obscure in parts.

[Jo-anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely, gentle book. A friend introduced me to this writer and I’m looking forward to finding other books by this author.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have long been struck by the late 15th-century painting in the National Gallery, London of Tobias and the Angel – its vividness and vivacity as well as the relative obscurity of the story it tells. In fact, rather like the protagonist in Salley Vickers’ debut novel I even looked up the story in my copy of the Apocrypha at one stage, though I really didn’t find myself much the wiser about its import.

So it was with interest that I discovered that the plot of Miss Garnet’s Angel was intimately bound up with the story of Tobias and his journey with the angel Raphael, but also with a storyline that was largely set in Venice in the last decade of the 20th century, before Italy adopted the euro as its currency.

But the more I read the more I wanted to know about the eponymous protagonist Julia Garnet, about the nature of her ‘angel’, and about the people whom she, as a person who saw herself as friendless, interacted with as if with friends.

Retired teacher Julia Garnet shares a flat in Ealing, London with her friend Harriet, but when Harriet dies Julia throws caution to the winds, lets out the flat for six months and arranges a lengthy sojourn in lodgings in the Dorsoduro district of Venice. What has led this unmarried pedagogue with no ties, armed with a history degree and communist principles, to choose here when her previous vacations were taken in Eastern Europe?

But, as with countless English visitors on the Grand Tour or on Thomas Cook package holidays, Venice weaves its spell on her, even in wintry days of January. From her flat by the campo dell’Angelo Raffaele she can see the church of St Raphael the Archangel with its curious statuary of the angel with saggy socks, Tobias with a fish – and let’s not forget the dog. These figures will come to form part of an obsessive quest.

And she will also come to make new friends – her landlady, a helpful boy whom she’ll attempt to tutor in English, a mature Venetian who pays court to her and a pair of young English restorers at a nearby chapel funded through the Venice in Peril charity. Then there are the Cutforths, a kind American couple who first mistake her for an eccentric English duchess, and an aged Monsignore with whom secrets will be shared.

And interweaving Julia’s story is the ancient story of Tobit’s exile in Nineveh, his son’s journey east with the stranger Azarias and his dog, and what unfolded after.

Bald outlines don’t do justice to this novel. You might mistake this for a romance or a piece of magical realism, you might detect overtones of historical fiction or mystery, travelogue or myth, but in all honesty it is all of these but yet of itself and more, for it speaks of truth and lies and the grey areas in between; it tells of beauty and ugliness and how they can transform into their opposite; it reminds us there are no really new stories, just old stories told in different ways.

Above all it asks us to believe in transfiguration, the outward face of transformation or metamorphosis; how else are we to regard the change that occurs when a spiky, plain and apparently misanthropic woman comes to glow with an inner warmth and beauty even while a generous, forgiving spirit grows within her?

And let’s not forget that the names Raphael and Azarias (or Azariah) have similar meanings – God has healed, God has helped. Miss Garnet’s Angel is more than it seems on the surface.

[Pascale · Rating 1 out of 5]

A complete mish-mash of romance and boring disquisitions on Biblical characters. A mediocre history teacher in retirement moves to Venice for 6 months after the death of her house-mate. Julia Garnet then meets an American academic and his socialite wife, British twins involved in the restoration of a church, a cute little boy and the pedophile who is after him, and a wise old Monsignor. None of the characters are particularly interesting or believable. The sub-plot involving the twins is particularly convoluted as the girl, who at first seems competent and friendly, turns out to be a basket case who drove her father to suicide under the influence of her shrink who put it into her head that her father had abused her. While restoring the church, she smuggles out a valuable painting and tries to sell it through Carlo the pedophile. Julia, who has turned into a sleuth is able to foil this evil plan, thereby enabling Tobias, who is in fact not Sarah's twin brother but her cousin, to marry her. It's never clear what motivates Sarah to want to sell a stolen painting in the first place, but then nothing much makes sense in this bloated plot interlarded with a retelling of the apocryphal story of Tobias and all sorts of other bits of undigested and indigestible erudition. I picked up this book during a visit to Venice but not even the numerous allusions to various locales made it worthwhile.

[WendyGradwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful love story between a lonely spinster and the city of Venice. The heroine, Julia Garnet, is beautifully drawn - I could visualise her in her dead friend’s hat and veil and her own Harris Tweed moving through the mists of Venice. Julia recognises her own faults, how she is easily irritated and quick to make judgements on others, yet what she does not see is how easily likeable she is. Part of her charm reveals itself when she finds herself captivated by the ancient tale of Tobias and the Angel through the religious artworks of Venice. This becomes a second narrative and at first I found it hard to draw parallels between it and Julia’s story. What matters, though, is how Julia interprets the tale and how it strengthens her sense of self. The ambiguous ending was both surprising and, for me, spiritually satisfying.

[Margaret McCulloch-Keeble · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't think I would like this and for the first third I thought I was correct. I persevered though and in the end I did enjoy it but I can't really say why. My dad would've loved it with all its biblical references and hidden meanings. It's a coming of age story. Middle age. Miss Garnet is a bit of a snob who is finally realising what a dull person she is and that there's room in (her) life for what she views as unnecessary beauty.

[Caz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why was I reading this? Why did I feel compelled to finish it? I wasn't particularly enjoying the story, such as it is. Nor did the characters grab me. I enjoy the later SV work, so I thought I'd give this a try..... nothing significant in that. But I felt I had to finish it. So I did. Simple as that. I can't really recommend it because it didn't truely engage me one way or the other but I can't condemn it either because I did read it, finish it.
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