The Marriage Portrait: Maggie O'Farrell in conversation with Sam Baker

Tickets £5-£25.

Location: Morningside United Church Hall, 15 Chamberlain Road, EH10 4DH

This is a live, in-person event.

From the number one bestselling author of Hamnet and winner of the 2020 Women's Prize comes a new historical novel set in Renaissance Italy.

We cannot wait to welcome Maggie O'Farrell back with her breathtaking new novel, The Marriage Portrait - the story of Cosimo de' Medici's third daughter, Lucrezia, as she learns to navigate the Florentine court and an enigmatic new husband. Maggie will be in conversation with author, journalist and broadcaster Sam Baker.

About the Book:

‘I thought I had made myself clear. I want something that conveys her majesty, her bloodline. Do you understand? She is no ordinary mortal. Treat her thus.’ 

Florence, the 1560s. Lucrezia, third daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, is free to wander the palazzo at will, wondering at its treasures and observing its clandestine workings. But when her older sister dies on the eve of marriage to Alfonso d’Este, heir to the Duke of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: Alfonso is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father to accept on her behalf.

Having barely left girlhood, Lucrezia must now make her way in a troubled court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appears before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?

As Lucrezia sits in uncomfortable finery for the painting which is to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferrarese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, her future hangs entirely in the balance.

About the Author:

Maggie O’Farrell, FRSOL, is the author of Hamnet, Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I am, I am, I am - both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers. Her novels include After You'd Gone, My Lover's Lover, The Distance Between Us (which won a Somerset Maugham Award), The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award), Instructions For a Heatwave and This Must Be the Place. She is also the author of two books for children, Where Snow Angels Go and The Boy Who Lost His Spark.

About Our Chair:

Sam Baker is a journalist, broadcaster and editor. She grew up in Hampshire and after a degree in politics at Birmingham University became a journalist, going on to edit some of the UK’s biggest magazines, including Cosmopolitan and Red. In 2015 she co-founded The Pool with Lauren Laverne. Sam is the author of five novels. Her first work of non-fiction, The Shift: how I (lost and) found myself after 40 – and you can too, has been so successful that Sam has made a podcast out of it!