Painting Time, Paperback

Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by The Guardian and The Millions

An aesthetic and existential coming-of-age novel exploring the apprenticeship of a young female painter. In Maylis de Kerangal's Painting Time, we are introduced to the burgeoning young artist Paula Karst, who is enrolled at the famous Institut de Peinture in Brussels. Unlike the friends she makes at school, Paula strives to understand the specifics of what she's painting--replicating a wood's essence or a marble's wear requires method, technique, and talent, she finds, but also something else: craftsmanship. She resolutely chooses the painstaking demands of craft over the abstraction of high art. With the attention of a documentary filmmaker, de Kerangal follows Paula's career, which is punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles, and long, festive evenings. An enchanted and atmospheric coming-of-age novel, Painting Time is an intimate and unsparing exploration of craft, inspiration, and the contours of the contemporary art world. As she did in her acclaimed novels The Heart and The Cook, de Kerangal unravels a tightly wound professional world to reveal the beauty within.

Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several novels, including Naissance d'un pont (published in English as Birth of a Bridge), which won the Prix Médicis in 2010; Réparer les vivants, whose U.S. English translation, The Heart, was one of The Wall Street Journal's Top Ten Novels of 2016; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. She lives in Paris. Jessica Moore is the author of the books Everything, Now and The Whole Singing Ocean. Her translation of Turkana Boy, by Jean-François Beauchemin, received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and her translation of Maylis de Kerangal's Réparer les vivants, published as Mend the Living, was long-listed for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize and won the U.K.'s Wellcome Prize in 2017.