The Glassmaker

On Murano in 1486, Orsola Rosso belongs to a family of glassmakers whose workshop passes to her unstable brother after their father’s death. Women are excluded from the furnaces, so Orsola secretly learns to make glass beads at her kitchen table with guidance from the historical bead-maker Maria Barovier. Her work helps support the family and gives her a creative identity that marriage, motherhood and guild custom cannot entirely suppress.

Time moves alla Veneziana, carrying Orsola and those around her through plague, commercial decline, Casanova’s eighteenth-century Venice, Napoleon’s destruction of the republic, two world wars, mass tourism and the COVID era while they age only gradually. Her beads reach figures including Joséphine de Beauharnais and Luisa Casati. The novel uses its altered chronology to trace the endurance of Murano craft, women’s work and family memory as Venice changes from a trading power into a city sustained by art and visitors.