I read The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier on my final flight home from holiday in Sri Lanka. As a fan of the author (see my blogs on The Last Runaway, At the Edge of the Orchard and A Single Thread), I always look forward to reading her latest novel.

The Glassmaker is set in Venice over a succession of different time periods, with the metaphor of a skimming stone and historical era summaries at the top of sections used to show us skipping from one time to another. The protagonist is glassmaker from Murano, Orsola Rosso, who begins the book as a girl, fascinated by her family business and determined to enter a man’s world and learn to make glass herself. As the centuries pass she weathers both actual and metaphorical storms to keep the business afloat and to experiment with creating with the beauty of glass. Research is everywhere in this book and it is fascinating to learn about the process of glassmaking, its perils and rewards.

The author says in the acknowledgements that she went through multiple rewrites to make the numerous time shifts work but to me (a traditionalist) they still didn’t. I would have found it much easier to follow one family down different generations if Chevalier wanted to cover all of this historical material, or to stick with the protagonist in her first time period, but the device of her ageing so slowly that she exists both during the plague and Covid was just a leap too far for me and ended my suspension of disbelief.