Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s immense, powerful novel – 'Watching over Her' – won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, when it was first published in French in 2023. It went on to become one of the best-selling of the Goncourt winners. Its English translation will be published in August 2025 and there is also talk of a screen adaptation. Accolades that are richly deserved.

This novel is so many things: it is a love story, but not in the conventional sense; it is a vast historical epic ranging over twentieth century Italian history and the rise of Fascism; it is a disquisition on art and creativity, on religion and politics; and it is a sprawling family saga documenting a time of huge social changes and the gradual eradication of traditional certainties.

The first-person narrative centres on Michelangelo – known as Mimo – Vitaliani, a sculptor living in the Sacra di St Michel, a monastery near Turin. The story opens in 1986 when Mimo is dying. The novel then shifts back in time for Mimo to tell his story, from his birth in 1904 through his journey to creative success. Mimo is not born into privilege, but his talent brings him to the notice of the aristocratic Orsini family in Pietra d’Alba and he strikes an unlikely friendship with the daughter of the house, Viola.

The writing is superb and the narrative time shifts are deftly handled as we constantly move from present to past, the different time periods melding into this portrait of a life. Suspense is exceptionally well-handled, outcomes of key events often tantalisingly denied until later in the story’s progression.

There are beautiful descriptions throughout and the Italian landscape becomes almost a character in its own right, ‘A firework of tangerine, melon, apricot, mimosa and sulphur flowers that never faded and contrasted with the dark forest’. Stone is a repeated image, apt for the story of a sculptor, from the Romanesque columns of Sacra di St Michel to the natural ‘faded pink’ stone of the landscape to the monumental architecture of fascism. The characterisation is detailed and believable, with characters revealed in all their complexity and contradictions. The naturally talented Mimo is thwarted by his class and physical restrictions; the ferociously intelligent Viola is held back by expectations from her genteel upbringing and her gender. Even the secondary characters have depth and humour is often used to good effect. Mimo is stopped by a German soldier in Montmartre during the Occupation and asked if he is Toulouse-Lautrec. Vittorio and Emanuele, illegitimate twin brothers who live in the village, are portrayed with a gentle and sympathetic wit.

The blending of the storyline and historical events is also skilfully done. The characters are all caught up in wider issues and their reactions and responses are key to the way the story develops. The world is also often seen in terms of art: the frantic Futurist vibrancy of Turin; the hazy pointillist landscape of Liguria. The central example of this is the idea of the Pietà, both Michelangelo’s and the one that Mimo will himself later create.

The story gripped me from start to finish, despite its length, and I never flagged. The cataclysmic ending is both unexpected, shocking and deeply satisfying. This is writing of the first order.