Paint the Wind

by Linda Cardillo

Maya Sircos, the daughter of a Greek shipping entrepreneur and an Austrian aristocrat, has never quite fit into the upper class world of early twentieth-century Vienna.

Caught up in the crucible of intellectual, artistic, and scientific transformation that defined the city as the cultural capital of Europe, she defies her upbringing and scandalizes both her family and Viennese society by becoming the muse and model for a brilliant young Expressionist artist.

Banished by her parents to her grandparents’ home on the Greek island of Skiathos, she encounters someone who challenges her to create art herself rather than continue as the object of someone else’s vision. Driven to reinvent herself, she must overcome the perception of her as merely a model and confront the indifference of the art world toward women painters.

A story of art, passion, and the will to create.

397 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 16, 2025

About the author

LINDA CARDILLO is an award-winning author of historical fiction and historical romance. She writes about the old country and the new, the tangle and embrace of family, and finding courage in the midst of loss.

From the time she was in high school, Linda held in her heart the dream of writing the Great American Novel. But she was also brought up to know that she had to be “practical” and make a living. After graduating from college, she found a job as a secretary at a venerable Boston publishing house (barely passing the typing test). Within a year she had moved into an editorial position for college textbooks in the sciences and social sciences. It still wasn’t the Great American Novel, but she got to immerse herself in American intellectual and social history.

After earning her MBA from Harvard Business School—where she wrote comedy for the annual student musical and performed in a platinum blonde wig while seven months pregnant—she got divorced and gave birth. She then became circulation manager for the launch of Inc. magazine and got a crash course in magazine marketing. Unfortunately, she also crashed head-on into her boss and got fired a year after the magazine’s successful start.

Around this time she got an invitation to her tenth college reunion, signed up to attend and fell in love with a man she hadn’t seen since freshman year. On an excursion to a zoo, her son got carsick and threw up. This wonderful man calmly got him out of the car, cleaned him up and took him for a walk in the fresh air, and she knew she had a keeper.

Linda and the keeper moved to Germany for a few years with their children. While living in Europe, she received an unexpected gift of love letters that became the seeds for her first novel, Dancing on Sunday Afternoons.

Linda has been married for over forty years to the keeper, a brilliant scientist and sailor, and is the mother of three children of whom she is enormously proud. She loves to cook and is happiest when the twelve chairs around her dining room table are filled with people enjoying her food. She speaks four languages, some better than others. She tries to play the piano every night—sometimes by herself and sometimes in an improvisational duet with her younger son. She does The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in ink, a practice she learned from her mother. From her mother she also absorbed a love of opera, especially those of Puccini and Verdi, whose music filled her home when she was a child. She once climbed Mt. Kenya and has very curly hair. Linda and the keeper live in Western Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Patricia Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve neglected my work, my meals, my friends—but I couldn’t help it. Paint the Wind is a treasure of a book and I just had to finish it! It’s a fascinating multi-layered story stretching decades, guided by the clarion voice and presence of Maya Sircos, the narrator for most of the story. To be immersed in the avant garde world of Expressionist painting in Vienna, marooned on a Greek isle against her will, to find in herself the very artist she was always meant to be, Maya rises to the most difficult challenges with imagination and grace. She is surrounded by a culture peopled by misogynists and held in by custom and laws that mitigated against the experimental artistry and independent undertakings of women. In a story of surprises, depth and scope, Paint the Wind will hold you in its spell, make you weep, make your heart swell with gratitude. You gotta read this book!

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I could not put it down. The author writes beautifully and the characters stay with you well after you have finished the book.