The Art of Her Life by Cynthia Newberry Martin

At nine years old, on her first visit to a museum, Emily fell in love with Breakfast, a painting by Henri Matisse. Now a single mother, she lives in the world of art and can barely find time for her two daughters, much less for Mark, the man she loves. Her days are a jumble-she's lost the thread of her life-but a contest at the museum where she's the registrar gives her hope-the chance to see Breakfast again. Matisse's words and paintings permeate her days and nights, and glancing at a note card of the painting she loves, she sees something she's never seen before. The Art of Her Life shows the power of art to transform an ordinary life.

Kirkus Reviews calls it, "An unsentimental, luminous story about art, illness, and complicated relationships.”

"The splendid prose is tinted with the inimitable melancholy of Matisse's blue." —Howard Norman, author of The Ghost Clause

"There’s a spare lyric grace to Martin’s writing, and in this story, she captures the nuances of ordinary life – what we love and fear to risk, what we lose and ache to hold.” —Dawn Tripp, author of Georgia

"In The Art of Her Life, Cynthia Newberry Martin shows how the unexpected turns of a life can most often only be steadied and moored by what we hold deepest inside.” —Adam Braver, author of Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney

Cynthia Newberry Martin's first novel, Tidal Flats, won the Gold Medal in Literary Fiction at the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards and the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Fiction. Her second novel, Love Like This, was published in April of 2023. Her website features the How We Spend Our Days series, over a decade of essays by writers on their lives. She grew up in Atlanta and now lives in Columbus, Georgia, with her husband, and in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in a little house by the water.