Three women separated by a century yet bound to Trieste by hope, betrayal,
and a single piece of glass with an exalted provenance.
The Empress Elizabeth of Austria – Sisi as she was known to
her intimates – was a woman of legendary loveliness, impressive intelligence,
and iron determination. Too young pushed into a loveless marriage, chosen as simply another
beautiful object for her new husband’s collection, she’s worked tirelessly for
the empire and scraped as much independence as she can from the stultifying
life of the Imperial Court. Now she’s had enough. Wielding only her beauty and
the perfect prism, can she engineer an enduring alternative life for herself?
After five decades of turmoil in Europe
– including two world wars and the eradication of the Austrian Empire – the
prism resurfaces in the hands of a skilled young mathematician. Marijana is on
loan from Yugoslavia to an American-led
scientific construction in Trieste, and through
her attempts to escape her Communist future we learn more of the prism’s
history. Five decades later Ravenna, another
math-minded woman who came of age in the chaos of post-Soviet Europe, tracks down Marijana, bringing the prism and its storied
provenance back to the light.
Covering this wide span of geopolitical history, it's inevitable that some subjects will not receive as much
attention as some readers might wish. The book is an invitation to
explore as much as an intriguing tale.
Woven through this saga of strong women fighting Fate is a love song to the perfect order of mathematics and the
intricate machinery of scientific discovery since the European Renaissance.
ISBN-10: 1772421146
ISBN-13: 978-1772421149
Born in Niagara Falls, New York, Rosemary has long
made her home in Toronto, where she has worked as a university instructor, an
editor and a bookstore clerk and of course-a writer.
