We are delighted to announce that Her Majesty Queen Camilla has selected James Cahill’s debut novel TIEPOLO BLUE as one of her books for Season Sixteen of The Queen’s Reading Room, a charity and online book club that works ‘to celebrate and promote the power and benefits of reading and is on a mission to help more people find and connect with books which enrich their lives.’
The Queen’s Reading Room will be sharing James’ insights into the book, exclusive content and Queen Camilla’s own personal words of recommendation for the book on their Instagram page and on their website from 22 November until the 5 of December. TIEPOLO BLUE follows recent selections including Robert Harris’ ARCHANGEL, THE HOUSE OF DOORS by Tan Twan Eng and the E.F. Benson classic MAPP AND LUCIA, as well as fellow Blake Friedmann author Peter James, featured for his GRACE series of novels in December 2021, and later described by Queen Camilla as the writer of her favourite fictional detective. Alongside TIEPOLO BLUE, Season 16 will also include YOU ARE HERE by David Nicholls, LES MISÉRABLES by Victor Hugo and THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES by Edmund de Waal.
James Cahill’s debut novel TIEPOLO BLUE was published by Sceptre in Summer 2022 and shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. It was later named one of the Best Books of 2022 by the BBC, and was widely acclaimed by readers and critics alike. The Evening Standard wrote: ‘This divine debut from art critic and academic James Cahill is the smart, sexy read you need in 2022… Not only an addictive page-turner, Cahill’s book taps into the tensions and suspicions between generations that feels incredibly relevant for our testy times.’
James Cahill’s second novel, THE VIOLET HOUR, will be published by Sceptre in February 2025.
Set in Cambridge, 1994, TIEPOLO BLUE follows Professor Don Lamb, a revered art historian at the height of his powers, consumed by the book he is writing about the skies of the Venetian master Tiepolo. However, Don’s academic brilliance belies a deep inexperience of life and love.
When an explosive piece of contemporary art is installed on the lawn of his college, it sets in motion Don’s abrupt departure from Cambridge to take up a role at a south London museum. There he befriends Ben, a young artist who draws him into the anarchic 1990s British art scene and the nightlife of Soho.
Over the course of one long, hot summer, Don glimpses a liberating new existence. But his epiphany is also a moment of self-reckoning, as his oldest friendship – and his own unexamined past – are revealed to him in a devastating new light. As Don’s life unravels, he suffers a fall from grace that that shatters his world into pieces.
Image: Darren Wheeler
About James Cahill
James Cahill was born in London. Over the past decade, he has worked in the art world and academia, combining writing and research with a role at a leading contemporary art gallery. He is currently a Research Fellow in Classics at King’s College London. His writing on art has appeared in publications including The Burlington Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. He was the lead author and consulting editor of FLYING TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN (Phaidon, 2018), a survey of classical myth in art from antiquity to the present day. He was the co-curator of ‘The Classical Now’, an exhibition at King’s College London (March-April 2018), examining the relationships between ancient, modern and contemporary art.
Praise for TIEPOLO BLUE
‘Beautifully captures disorientation, tenderness and heat without tipping into excess…an electric new novel written by an author skilled in the evocation of vertiginous, heightened emotion.’ – Michael Donkor, The Guardian, ‘Book of the Day’
‘[An] arresting debut novel… [the prose] has a masterly attention to (especially visual) detail and in an irresistibly propulsive, almost swaggering style.’ – Literary Review
‘Simply magnificent…TIEPOLO BLUE really has blown me away: the gorgeous phrase-making; the sure-footed pacing; the (re-)immersion in a world I know, or knew, in a way that is both hard-edged with historical detail and almost hallucinatory.’ – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author and former Man Booker judge
‘The spirit of E.M. Forster is alive and well in James Cahill.’ – Edmund White
‘This is the best novel I have read for ages. It is so beautifully written, not a false note in any sentence. [Cahill’s] presentation of the agonising clash of aesthetics, of culture, of generations… it’s just masterly… It all grips you like a thriller. My heart was constantly in my throat as I read… [There is] so much to enjoy, to contemplate, to wonder at, and to be lost in.’ – Stephen Fry
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