Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison #Peggy #NetGalley. Book Spotlight!

Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy is a blazingly fresh interpretation of a woman who defies every expectation to become an original. The daughter of two Jewish dynasties, Peggy finds her cloistered life turned upside down at fourteen, when her beloved father perishes on the Titanic. 

His death prompts Peggy to seek a life of passion and personal freedom and, above all, to believe in the transformative power of art. We follow Peggy as she makes her way through the glamorous but sexist and anti-Semitic art worlds of New York and Europe and meet the numerous men who love her (and her money) while underestimating her intellect, talent, and vision.

Along the way, Peggy must balance her loyalty to her family with her need to break free from their narrow, snobbish ways and the unexpected restrictions that come with vast fortune.

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Advance Praise

“Peggy had often been misunderstood and disrespected, seen as a slutty dilettante who threw her money around. But Rebecca [Godfrey] took Peggy seriously, as a woman full of wit, savvy, and passion, hungry for experience and purpose and with an eye for art, and for people, that others couldn’t yet appreciate.” –Leslie Jamison, in The New Yorker

“A beautifully imagined and superbly written novel about the tenuous line between life and art. Godfrey brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times.”—Jenny Offill

“A tremendous work of the imagination . . . Peggy Guggenheim embodied the twentieth century, but attempts to capture her vitality and uniqueness have tended to fall flat. No more! Rebecca Godfrey’s prose is as stylish as her protagonist and every bit as deep, sensuous, and thoughtful. . . . An unparalleled life presented as a page-turner.”—Gary Shteyngart

 A dazzling, richly imagined novel about Peggy Guggenheim—a story of art, family, love, and becoming oneself—by the award-winning author of Under the Bridge, now a Hulu limited series starring Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone

“Godfrey brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times.”—Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

“Magnificent . . . Readers will be won over by Godfrey’s incandescent portrait of a singular woman.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Rebecca Godfrey

She wrote three books The Torn Skirt, Under the Bridge, and Peggy, which will be published posthumously in August.

Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller, and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's and the Oxford American, among others, and she is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

To learn more about Leslie:

visit her website,

www.lesliejamison.com

and follow her on Twitter

@lsjamison.