The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell is the choice for this month’s Church Times Book Club. On the podcast this week, Caroline Chartres, who has written this month’s Book Club reflection on the book, is in conversation with Sarah Meyrick. 

Maggie O’Farrell transports the reader to Renaissance Italy in her latest historical novel The Marriage Portrait. It is based on the true story of teenage bride Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici, the inspiration for Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess”, who died only a few years after marrying the esteemed Duke of Ferrara.

In the book, O’Farrell reimagines the Duchess’s fraught final years, following her journey from the safety of her childhood home in Florence to the remote hunting lodge where her husband keeps her captive. Sections of the story are told from the first-person perspective, and Lucrezia’s fear that her husband is out to kill her is palpable.

The Marriage Portrait is published by Tinder Press at £9.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.99); 978-1-4722-23880-3.

Caroline Chartres is a contributing editor to the Church Times.

Sarah Meyrick is assistant editor of the Church Times and is to be its next editor. Her latest novel is Joy and Felicity (Sacristy Press, 2021). 

The Church Times Book Club is run in association with the Festival of Faith and Literature. 

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Discuss this month’s book at facebook.com/groups/churchtimesbookclub

Click the play button above to listen to this podcast. You can also listen to the Church Times Podcast on the Church Times app for iPhone and iPad, SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most other podcast platforms. Music for the podcast is by Twisterium.