Author(s): Penelope Curtis

Novel | Les Fugitives | Art

In early 1920s England, Nora’s life is in a state of flux: leaving one husband for another, she embarks on a new existence on the margins of the cultural and political elite, trying to hold onto her aspirations as a painter, along with her relationships.

In late 1960s Glasgow, young biologist Maria de Sousa wrestles with her feelings for an older colleague, Adam Curtis – the author’s father. The unclear connection between the two impels the narrator, fifty years later, to seek out answers in Lisbon: what really happened between Adam and Maria?

After Nora bridges three generations, and moves between London, Paris, southern England, Scotland, Jamaica and Portugal, touching on key scientific discoveries, artistic and historical landmarks, the Carnation Revolution and a global pandemic. Penelope Curtis offers sensitive portraits of those whose lives she has had to imagine in order to understand, in an ambitious novel that movingly resurrects a past whose remnants still permeate the present. Poignantly revealing the forces which check personal callings, the novel also explores, among other things, the ways in which love is balanced with creative independence.

Penelope Curtis is an art historian whose first novel imagines the life and motivations of Nora, the grandmother she never knew but whose paintings she inherited. Curtis envisions Nora as a woman deeply struggling to identify her sources of self-worth. This account of her grandmother’s doubts as to the importance of her own art is accompanied, too, by that of another woman: the Portuguese scientist Maria de Sousa, who had worked in Glasgow with Curtis’s father, also a scientist, and whom the author eventually met in Lisbon, after her father’s death. After Nora is a three-part novel that talks of the meaning of creative independence through the lives of three generations. It touches on the ways in which morality can check artistic, professional and emotional callings, and exert a binding and compelling power over these. The novel also underscores the limits of knowledge, of others and the self, attempting all the while to recreate the nature of past loves.