The Realist
A Novel of Berenice Abbott
Sarah Coleman
Paperback
A novel inspired by the life and work of Berenice Abbott, one of modern photography’s most provocative and fearless heroines.
- ISBN 9781781327296
- Published Dec 2017
- Paperback
229 x 152mm (354 pages) - Also available as:
Hardback £24.99
Cleveland, 1910: For a poor girl whose father has abandoned her, the prospect of becoming an artist is almost non-existent. But Bernice Abbott is resourceful and will happily challenge convention in order to succeed.
Setting out to fulfill her dream, she embarks on a journey that will take her from bohemian Greenwich Village to the giddy cafés of 1920s Paris to a New York rising from the ashes of the Great Depression. On the way, illness and a tragic romance test her mettle, but a lucky coincidence leads her to the emerging art form of photography.
Transforming herself from ‘dull’ Bernice to cosmopolitan Berenice, she sets the tone for life as a portrait photographer in the Paris of Hemingway and Picasso, and prepares to take on the men who are threatened by her vision and strength.
Sarah Coleman has written about photography, visual art and film for publications including
ARTnews,
Salon,
Communication Arts,
Photo District News and
View Camera. She has a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from Columbia University and has done artist residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She blogs about photography and literature at
theliteratelens.com, and lives in Manhattan and Woodstock, NY with her husband and two children. This is her first novel.
Independent, bisexual, a photographer and inventor—Berenice Abbott defied convention in life and art. In The Realist, Sarah Coleman offers a complex, engaging portrait in rich visual language that does justice to Abbott’s moxie and her luminous images. This is an impressive debut novel, as beautifully crafted as one of Abbott’s photographs. I loved everything about it.
– Whitney Otto, author of Eight Girls Taking Pictures
The Realist is a wonder: gracefully written, poignantly rendered, and as illuminating as a camera’s brilliant flash in a dark room. In re-imagining the life of seminal photographer Berenice Abbott, Sarah Coleman has shaped a portrait of a woman who sees the world with great clarity, yet must fight for acceptance at every turn.
– Jennifer Cody Epstein, author of The Painter from Shanghai
Download a copy of Sarah's Advance Information sheet
here.
Take a look at
this review of
The Realist in the
Los Angeles Review of Books.
“If you’re thinking of self-publishing, I hope you don't go at it alone. With a team like SilverWood behind you, you have the support you need to publish the best work you believe in.”
J A Higgins
