Still Life with Bread Crumbs

A Novel

By: Anna Quindlen

Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie

A superb love story from the number-one New York Times best-selling author Anna Quindlen

Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.

Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever imagined.

©2014 Anna Quindlen (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Carrington MacDuffie's rich voice is a perfect match for Quindlen's exquisite story.... [her] natural style and subtle character voices add even more charm to the story, keeping the listener engaged from start to finish." ( AudioFile)

A Gentrified Harlequin

This book got an unqualified rave in the New York Times Book Review. I was led to expect a wry, tough-minded, light-hearted, clear-eyed look at the plight of a single, sixty-year-old artist and her world.

Not so! Stuffed with clunky stereotypes, improbable coincidences and dubious epiphanies, this book gives "chick lit" its reputation for triviality. Our heroine, Rebecca, is tall and effortlessly slender, like any romance novel heroine, except much more tastefully dressed -- black everything, straight un-dyed hair and no makeup, which I suppose is meant to signal her stature as a serious artist. (This is the first wrong note: If Nora Ephron taught us anything, it's that sixty for women is nothing if not relentless grooming). It has been twenty years since her divorce, but she chews over this old failure endlessly, with no apparent insight: her ex-husband is portrayed in terms so exclusively negative I half-expected him to start twirling a pair of mustachios. The village in which she finds herself has an equally manichean populace: one is either good and simple (the baker) or cruel and incompetent (the baker's husband). Our heroine's love interest is a rough-hewn, straight-talking man's man, who spends an awful lot of time setting a good example and threatening the folks who won't follow it. Lest you excuse him as just the male counterpart of Rebecca, acquiring the habit of warning kids off his lawn, he's much much younger than she. And an environmentalist. And, true to the romance genre, he has a Secret Sorrow, which provides the pivot on which this creaky tale balances. So careless is the plot that at one point I thought perhaps Rebecca was going to be revealed, thrillingly, as not an artist, but a dimwit: she writes a crucial letter to her love, but never sends it, because she does not know his address. Though she HAS been to his house, which is just down the road. And he's been faithfully plowing her drive all winter.

The author has some good descriptions of the domestic woes of a young mother, and has a sharp eye for the customs and citizens of high culture: I found myself wishing Rebecca would stay in this world and fight for her work. It would have been a truer, and harder-won, victory. But instead, I think we can confidently expect a middling Hollywood movie, starring Diane Lane or Julianna Margulies, with whoever is taking over Viggo Mortensen's roles as the younger hunk.

I now picture the NYT reviewer: well-educated, well-connected, in head-to-toe Eileen Fisher, who would never be caught with anything like Fabio on the cover of a book she reads, but who nonetheless yearns for Romance. The cover is completely respectable -- you can carry it without shame on the subway -- but the goods within are shoddy indeed.

Excellent

Would you consider the audio edition of Still Life with Bread Crumbs to be better than the print version?

Miss reading her in the Times. Haven't read one of her books and this was an excellent place to start. Really enjoyed it.

always the A Quindlin fan

quick listen
Story was not typical thanks AQ.
entertaining, and pleasant
Enjoyed AQ's discretions from dogs to houses

Didn't want it to end

Took me a bit to get the characters straight only because I seem to have this challenge with audible books, but once I did, I truly did not want it to end.

A truly lovely book for women over 50

Started off a bit slow, but after a few chapters the book began to develop into a real gem. Narrator was well-suited to the primary character.

It was a pleasant story.

I enjoyed listening to the narrator and the dialogue but the story was not gripping, just pleasant.

A steady tale of escape from the expected

What did you love best about Still Life with Bread Crumbs?

I enjoyed the narrator's somewhat staccato performance, as it seemed to mesh well with the main character's personality. I particularly enjoyed the author's use of the dog's perspective.

Exquisite!!

Simply said, this is a terrific story well-told with characters you will care deeply about, read by a wonderful storyteller. Buy it, read it, recommend it to your friends. Trust me, you'll be glad you did.

A pleasant story, an easy read

A pleasant story, an easy read: faint praise, I suppose. But sometimes that's exactly what you want. The characters are all nice people. The story moves along like a nice walk in the rural woods. Nothing terrible happens to anyone who is part of the story. There's barely any conflict at all. The main character attributes her artistic success to chance and the reader can believe it's true. Her deepest emotion is contempt for the man she divorced decades before. If you like to listen in bed with your sleep timer on (I do that several nights a week), give this one a try.

Average Story, Not a Lot Happening

This was okay. The writing was good, but the first part of the story dragged for me as nothing much seemed to happen. The second part was better and it kept me going until the end. I listened to this on audio, and the narration was fine; I don't think I would have liked it better in either print or audio format.