De Potter's Grand Tour: A Novel
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A gripping novel about a seemingly charmed marriage and a mysterious disappearance at sea
In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered and his wife is left to manage his affairs on her own. But as she starts to piece together his life, she realizes that everything was not as he had said. Infused with details from letters and diary entries, the narrative twists forward and backward through time, revealing a lost world of fake identities, underground antiques networks, and a husband who wasn't what he seemed.
Originally from Belgium, young Armand de Potter comes to New York without a penny in his pocket. With cunning ambition, he quickly makes a name for himself as both a worldwide travel guide and a trusted—if illegal—antiques dealer. After marrying, he moves the family to a luxurious villa in Cannes and embraces an aristocratic life. But as he grows increasingly entangled in the antiques trade and his touring business begins to falter, Armand's control starts to fray. As the world closes in, he believes he only has one option left.
Told with masterful narrative agility, De Potter's Grand Tour is a tale as grand as the tour guide at its center. Drawing on real letters, legal documents, and a trove of diaries only recently discovered, Joanna Scott points delicately toward the story's historical basis and unfolds a detective tale of the highest order.
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Joanna Scott. (2014). De Potter's Grand Tour: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Joanna Scott. 2014. De Potter's Grand Tour: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Joanna Scott, De Potter's Grand Tour: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
MLA Citation (style guide)Joanna Scott. De Potter's Grand Tour: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
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- bioText: Joanna Scott is the author of several books, including The Manikin, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Various Antidotes and Arrogance, which were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and the critically acclaimed Make Believe, Tourmaline, Liberation, and Follow Me. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Award.
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A gripping novel about a seemingly charmed marriage and a mysterious disappearance at sea
In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered and his wife is left to manage his affairs on her own. But as she starts to piece together his life, she realizes that everything was not as he had said. Infused with details from letters and diary entries, the narrative twists forward and backward through time, revealing a lost world of fake identities, underground antiques networks, and a husband who wasn't what he seemed.
Originally from Belgium, young Armand de Potter comes to New York without a penny in his pocket. With cunning ambition, he quickly makes a name for himself as both a worldwide travel guide and a trusted—if illegal—antiques dealer. After marrying, he moves the family to a luxurious villa in Cannes and embraces an aristocratic life. But as he grows increasingly entangled in the antiques trade and his touring business begins to falter, Armand's control starts to fray. As the world closes in, he believes he only has one option left.
Told with masterful narrative agility, De Potter's Grand Tour is a tale as grand as the tour guide at its center. Drawing on real letters, legal documents, and a trove of diaries only recently discovered, Joanna Scott points delicately toward the story's historical basis and unfolds a detective tale of the highest order.- reviews
- premium: False
- source: Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
- content:
"Joanna Scott is a writer to treasure and her beguiling new novel is an intrepid exploration of the world, of the past, and of the human heart."
- premium: False
- source: Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel and Ship Fever
- content: "Joanna Scott's writing is always a wonder, but this, with its hints of Hawthorne's 'Wakefield,' is her best yet: a wizardly dialogue between fact and fiction, the known and the unknown. I'll be haunted by her elusive, touching, and deluded hero for a long time."
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- source: Steve Erickson, author of These Dreams of You
- content: "Joanna Scott is the great tour guide of contemporary American fiction, navigating us across oceans of memory and longing. She doesn't sail around the reefs and shoals but steers us right for them, keeping every promise that we'll emerge on the other side intact, if not quite the same as before. In the company of Aimée de Potter as she intrepidly searches for her husband's ghost and secrets, Scott charts here one of her grandest tours yet, one more utterly singular story only she could have written."
- premium: False
- source: Bradford Morrow, author of The Diviner's Tale
- content: "Like some exquisite and mysterious tapestry that Armand de Potter himself might have admired on one of his journeys, Joanna Scott's new novel masterfully weaves an irresistible story of love, secrecy, ambition, and devastating folly. De Potter's Grand Tour coalesces history and imagination with such brilliant clarity that a world now long lost seems like a personal experience freshly remembered. Joanna Scott is a magician, a conjurer, one of the very best writers at work today."
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Starred review from July 1, 2014
A dilettante, scholar manque and artifact collector who may or may not be a member of the Belgian aristocracy reinvents himself in late-19th-century New York, embarking on a career as an international tour guide with the assistance of his devoted American wife.Arriving in New York in the 1870s, Armand de Potter is an ambitious immigrant who tries his hand at various business schemes before taking a position as a French teacher in an upstate girls school, where he impresses all with his erudition and patrician bearing. There, he meets his future wife, the genteel and competent Amy, whom he rechristens Aimee. The two found De Potter Tours, escorting wealthy American and British tourists to exotic locales, arranging all facets of the experience to minimize inconvenience for the travelers and enlightening them on the finer points of history and the former glories of fallen empires. Meanwhile, Armand seeks out looted antiquities and struggles to be recognized as a scholar and important collector by the academic establishment. His yearning for the approval and respect of high society, and his great fear of being exposed as an intellectual fraud, or worse, have tragic consequences. The story opens with a mention of Armand's disappearance at sea in 1905, and the rest of the book sets about constructing the intriguing back story and sad aftermath of this calamitous event. Scott (Follow Me, 2009, etc.) builds the tale in layers, providing the perspectives of both the self-mythologizing Armand, who sees no escape from impending financial ruin and ignominy, and the perplexed Aimee as she attempts to come to terms with the sudden loss of her husband and solve the mystery of his disappearance. Though his motives are carefully laid out, Armand remains somewhat unknowable, perhaps by design; Aimee, with nothing to hide, is a more developed and fully realized character.Scott has crafted an understated, atmospheric historical novel as well as an artful mystery set in an era of steamer ships and steam trains, when tourism was new and world travel was a glamorous and sometimes-perilous adventure.COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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August 1, 2014
Starting with the morning on which he disappears from a boat off the coast of Greece, Scott (Follow Me) traces the life of Armand de Potter, a Belgian immigrant to Gilded Age America. Armand transforms himself from a man without money or credentials into a well-heeled and respected leader of luxury travel groups and an international antiquities dealer. Alternating between the perspective of de Potter and his wife, Aimee, and moving backward and forward in time between the 1870s and early 20th century, Scott slowly reveals the successes and failures of a man who is both more and less than he seems. Did he fall, commit suicide, or make himself disappear? VERDICT Scott's approach may alienate readers who are lured to her book through a love of travel or those who prefer linear storytelling, but readers who stick with the author's layered narrative will find a fascinating tale of the dark side of the rags-to-riches story, a husband and wife whose reality is so convoluted that they aren't entirely known to each other or even to themselves.--Neil Hollands, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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August 1, 2014
An upstate New York farm girl falls in love with her French teacher, Armand de Potter, a self-described Belgian aristocrat. When they marry, he asks her to change her name from Amy to Aim'e, a minor deception in what will prove to be a life of elaborate facades. But they do live in style, thanks to the success of Armand's innovative venture, the De Potter Tours. As he, always scheming, and she, at once sensible and daring, guide wealthy tourists on first-class adventures around the world, Armand avidly, if not legally, acquires antiquities, amassing a collection he hopes will guarantee him posterity. But when Armand disappears at sea in 1905, Aim'e finds herself in financial straits and stunned by the extent of her husband's scams. The always nimble and imaginative Scott (Follow Me, 2009) riffs both wickedly and sympathetically on the life of the actual Armand de Potter. Ardently researched and sporting historic de Potter photographs, this smart, brisk, witty, and provocative novel is alight with vivid descriptions of the de Potters' travels, and electric with Agatha Christielike suspense.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)
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A gripping novel about a seemingly charmed marriage and a mysterious disappearance at sea
In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered and his wife is left to manage his affairs on her own. But as she starts to piece together his life, she realizes that everything was not as he had said. Infused with details from letters and diary entries, the narrative twists forward and backward through time, revealing a lost world of fake identities, underground antiques networks, and a husband who wasn't what he seemed.
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