TITIAN'S BOATMAN

Titian's Boatman is a masterful tale of three cities: Renaissance Venice and contemporary London and New York, and a story of people whose lives are changed forever by Titian's paintings.

TITIAN'S BOATMAN begins in Renaissance Venice, an extraordinarily beautiful, brutal and corrupt city, pulsating with painters, merchants and courtesans; a city belonging to the rat as much as the swallow. It is 1576 and as plague scythes through the populace, the ninety year old Titian, one of the greatest painters of the age, refuses to flee. His estranged son Pomponio returns to find his father's studio ransacked and paintings stolen.

In present day New York, Aurora Famosa, venerates a painting of Saint Sebastian that hangs in the apartment she cleans every week because it brings back memories of her childhood in Havana. Meanwhile in London, Terry Jardine, an actor rehearsing The Winter's Tale stands in front of his favourite painting in The National Gallery, Titian's The Man with the Blue Sleeve and is alarmed when it announces his impending death.

Victoria Blake was raised in one beautiful city, Oxford, and has written a book about another beautiful city Venice. She studied history at Oxford and is the daughter of the historian Robert Blake, best known for his pioneering biography of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. She is the author of the Sam Falconer crime series and has worked in both bookselling and publishing. Her most recent book Far Away has been shortlisted for the Historical Novel Society Indie Awards 2016.