The Vintner's Luck: A Novel - Hardcover

Knox, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374283923 ISBN 13: 9780374283926

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998

Synopsis

A novel of angels, wine, and love without boundaries set in nineteenth-century Burgundy.

One summer night in 1808, Sobran Jodeau sets out to drown his love sorrows in his family's vineyard. Drunk, he stumbles on an angel: "Someone had set a statue down on the ridge. Sobran blinked and swayed. For a second he saw what he knew--gilt, paint and varnish, the sculpted labial eye of a church statue. Then he swooned while still walking forward, and the angel stood quickly to catch him."

Once he gets over his shock, Sobran decides that Xas, the male angel, is his guardian sent to counsel him on everything from marriage to wine production. But Xas turns out to be a far more mysterious character. A favorite of both God and Satan, he is, unlike other angels, allowed to go freely about the world, collecting earthly roses for his garden. Sobran and Xas agree to meet on this night every year of Sobran's life, and eventually man and angel fall in passionate love, complicating both their lives.

Compelling and erotic, The Vintner's Luck explores a decidedly unorthodox love story as Sobran eventually comes to love and be loved by both Xas and the young Countess de Valday, his friend and employer at the neighboring château.

About this title

Review:

"A week after midsummer, when the festival fires were cold, and decent people were in bed an hour after sunset, not lying dry-mouthed in dark rooms at midday, a young man named Sobran Jodeau stole two of the freshly bottled wines to baptize the first real sorrow of his life."

The year is 1808, the place Burgundy, France. Among the lush vines of his family's vineyard, Jodeau, 18 years old and frustrated in love, is about to come face to face with a celestial being. But this is no sentimental "Touched by an Angel" seraph; as imagined by Elizabeth Knox in her wildly evocative and original novel, Xas is equipped with a glorious pair of wings ("pure sinew and bone under a cushion of feathers") and an appetite for earthly pleasures--wine, books, gardening, conversation, and, eventually, carnal love.

The fateful meeting between man and angel occurs on June 27. After an evening during which Sobran spills all his troubles and Xas gently advises him, the angel promises to return on the same night next year to toast Sobran's marriage. Thus begins a friendship that will last for 55 years, spanning marriages, wars, births, deaths, and even the vast distances between heaven, earth, and hell. In addition to the wonderfully flawed Sobran and his mysterious angel, Knox brilliantly limns secondary characters who are deeply sympathetic--from Sobran's unstable wife, Celeste, and his troubled brother, Leon, to his dear friend and confidante, the Baroness Aurora. Love, murder, madness, and a singular theology that would make a believer out of the most hardened atheist all add up, in The Vintner's Luck, to a novel that will break your heart yet leave you wishing for more. --Alix Wilber

About the Author:

Elizabeth Knox is the author of five books, but The Vintner's Luck is her first novel to be published outside of her native New Zealand. She lives with her family in Wellington.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0374283923
• ISBN 13: 9780374283926
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288