Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1000 Books to Read)

What a delightful read! It follows a Vermeer painting backward in time from the Present Day to 1672, when Vermeer painted it (it's not really one of his paintings, though). Vermeer is one of my favorite painters, so to say I was excited that the book was about one of his paintings is an understatement. It is very well-written, and I am excited to watch the movie, Brush with Fate, based on the book. 

I found this timeline was really helpful at the end of the book (don't want to spoil it by reading it before):

Girl in Hyacinth Blue--Timeline | Sutori

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

In this lovely and absorbing book, Susan Vreeland traces a putative Vermeer creation—Girl in Hyacinth Blue—backward in time through three centuries, from its theft by a Nazi officer through the hands of several owners to the studio of the artist himself. In a series of linked stories, Vreeland conveys the private lives and inscrutable emotions for which the mysterious, evocative figure of the painting stands as an emblem. Each story details a domestic drama in which “the momentous ordinary,” in the author’s phrase, is honored and ennobled, even as its characters—a family of Dutch Jews celebrating Passover the year before their deportation; a devoted couple consoled by the embrace of their long marriage; Vermeer’s daughter Magdalena, the model for the girl in the portrait—fall under the sway of history’s calamities and time’s indifference. Like the real paintings that are its inspirations, Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a quietly astonishing articulation of the evanescent emotions that convey enduring human truths.