Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and now legendary art collector, sits in the sun of her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. She is pensive, thinking back on her exciting, tragic, almost impossible journey from her sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to here: an iconoclast and independent woman.

Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy is a fiery fresh take on a woman who challenges every expectation of becoming an original. The daughter of two Jewish dynasties, Peggy’s life is turned upside down at age 14 when her beloved father perishes on the Titanic. His death prompts Peggy to seek a life of passion and personal freedom, and above all, to believe in the transformative power of art. We follow Peggy as she navigates the glamorous but sexist and anti-Semitic art world of New York and Europe, meeting the numerous men who love her (and her money) while underestimating her intellect, talent and vision. Along the way, Peggy must balance her loyalty to her family with her need to break free from their narrow-minded, snobbish ways and the unexpected limitations that come with a vast fortune.

In a tour de force of imagination and insight, Rebecca Godfrey’s final book – completed by her friend, the acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison, after Godfrey’s death in 2022 – brings to life the woman who helped make the Guggenheim name synonymous with art and genius. (By Knopf Random Vintage Canada)

Rebecca Godfrey was an author and journalist known for her books The torn skirtwhich was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the award-winning true crime story Under the bridgewhich was adapted as a Disney+ series. She grew up in Canada but lived in upstate New York. Peggy is the last novel that Leslie Jamison completed after her death.

Jamision is the Brooklyn-based author of The empathy tests, The recoverythe novel The Gin Cabinet and the memoirs Splinters.