'AN AMBITIOUS, PERCEPTIVE NOVEL' GUARDIAN 'A WONDERFULLY IMAGINATIVE WRITER' WAS
HINGTON POST A fugitive train loaded with the plunder of a doomed people. A dazz
ling jewelled pendant in the form of a stylized peacock. And three men - an Amer
ican infantry captain in World War II, an Israeli-born dealer in art stolen by t
he Nazis, and a pioneering psychiatrist in fin-de-siecle Budapest - who find the
ir carefully-wrought lives turned upside-down by three fierce women, each locked
in a struggle against her own history and the history of our times.
And at t
he centre of Love and Treasure, nested like a photograph hidden in a locket, a m
ystery: where does the worth of a people and its treasures truly lie? What is th
e value of a gift, when giver and recipient have been lost - of a love offering
when the beloved is no more?In an intricately constructed narrative that is by t
urns funny and tragic, thrilling and harrowing, with all the expertise and narra
tive drive that readers have come to expect from her work, Waldman traces the un
likely journey, from 1914 Budapest to post-war Salzburg to present-day New York,
of the peacock pendant whose significance changes - token of friendship, love-o
ffering, unlucky talisman - with the changes of fortune undergone by her charact
ers as they find themselves caught up in the ebb and flow of modern European his
tory. Spanning continents and a hundred years of turbulent history, encompassing
war and revolution, the history of art, feminism and psychoanalysis, depicting
the range of human feeling from the darkness of a shattered Europe to the ordina
ry heartbreaks of a contemporary New York woman, Love and Treasure marks the ful
l maturity of a remarkable writer.
