A MONTH IN SIENA PB – HISHAM MATAR

When Hisham Matar was nineteen years old he came across the Sienese School of painting for the first time. In the year in which Matar s life was shattered by the disappearance of his father the work of the great artists of Siena seemed to offer him a sense of hope. Over the years since then, Matar s feelings towards these paintings would deepen and, as he says, Siena began to occupy the sort of uneasy reverence the devout might feel towards Mecca or Rome or Jerusalem . A Month in Siena is the encounter, twenty-five years later, between the writer and the city he had worshipped from afar. It is a dazzling evocation of an extraordinary place and its effect on the writer s life. It is an immersion in painting, a consideration of grief and a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and the human condition.