New release

The Sitter
by Angela O'Keeffe

A highly original work narrated by Hortense Cezanne, the wife of the celebrated artist, as she witnesses an author in 2020 write a book about her life.

A$29.99

(Paperback)

Available. Dispatched 2-3 business days

Overview

Paris, 2020. A writer is confined to her hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cezanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavour, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. But Hortense, always subject to the gaze of others, is increasingly intrigued by the woman before her. Who is she and what event hides in her past?

Heartbreaking and perfectly formed, The Sitter explores the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell.

Details

Awards

Reviews

Media

Michelle Johnston

‘The Sitter is phenomenal. A remarkable feat and enthralling work, The Sitter is elegantly constructed – a book that weaves between reality and unreality and wonder with supreme ease. The nested scenes work perfectly, with not a word nor theme nor scene wasted. It moves through layers like music, up and down registers of hope and awe, regret, sadness and self-knowledge. The historical aspects are fascinating, the contemporary scenes compelling. O’Keeffe’s work floats. I was utterly spellbound.’

Mirandi Riwoe

‘Meditative and elegant, The Sitter by Angela O’Keeffe is the story of two women who find themselves in the study of each other. Their stories, their connections, are beautifully layered in this touching novel.’

Kate Cole-Adams

‘A gorgeous book, deft, tender, clear-eyed, about seeing and being seen; being and having been. A book that shimmers in the space between writer and reader, so full of life and light and knowledge I had to pause over and again to allow the pleasure of the language and images to settle in me before moving on.’

Fiona Kelly McGregor

‘In an ingenious reversal, Angela O'Keeffe conjures Paul Cezanne's wife and sitter, Hortense, out of the canvas and on to the page to observe her contemporary Australian writer. Hortense transcends time, language and country to narrate this strange and beautiful hallucination on the endlessly shifting boundary between art and life.’

Charlotte Wood

‘So assured in its experimentation.’

Angela O'Keeffe

Angela O’Keeffe grew up with nine siblings on a farm in the Lockyer Valley, Queensland. She completed a Master of Arts in Writing at UTS, and her first novel, Night Blue, was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. She was awarded the 2023 Varuna Eleanor Dark Fellowship. Her second novel, The Sitter, won the 2024 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award.