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The Lady and the Unicorn

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The Lady and the Unicorn

By: Tracy Chevalier
Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld, Terry Donnelly
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About this listen

 A tour de force of history and imagination, The Lady and the Unicorn is Tracy Chevalier’s answer to the mystery behind one of the art world’s great masterpieces—a set of bewitching medieval tapestries that hangs today in the Cluny Museum in Paris. They appear to portray the seduction of a unicorn, but the story behind their making is unknown—until now.

Paris, 1490.  A shrewd French nobleman commissions six lavish tapestries celebrating his rising status at Court. He hires the charismatic, arrogant, sublimely talented Nicolas des Innocents to design them. Nicolas creates havoc among the women in the house—mother and daughter, servant, and lady-in-waiting—before taking his designs north to the Brussels workshop where the tapestries are to be woven. There, master weaver Georges de la Chapelle risks everything he has to finish the tapestries—his finest, most intricate work—on time for his exacting French client. The results change all their lives—lives that have been captured in the tapestries, for those who know where to look.

In The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracy Chevalier weaves fact and fiction into a beautiful, timeless, and intriguing literary tapestry—an extraordinary story exquisitely told.©2004 Tracy Chevalier; (P)2004 Penguin Audio and BBC Audiobooks America Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Fantasy Fiction

Critic Reviews

"Tracy Chevalier has invented another juicy backstory to a great work of art…a lively, sexy, and thoroughly entertaining novel." —Entertainment Weekly

"Subtly rendered, surprisingly complex characters…a novel notable for its human warmth." —The New York Times Book Review

"Tracy Chevalier has spun a story as richly detailed as the medieval tapestries on which it’s based…a fascinating novel." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Tracy Chevalier's approach to fiction is so methodical that she threatens to turn writing about art into science." —The New York Times
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