"A complex, densely written and dreamlike narrative. A moving tale of love, fate and regret." - Wall Street Journal "Macfarlane sculpts several disparate tales into a smooth, rock-solid whole. His ambitions are high, but in a language as rich as the fruits of the scenic landscapes in which he situates his characters and their stories, he pulls off a far grander narrative with skill and intrigue." - Leslie Ken Chu, Vancouver Weekly on The Figures of Beauty "A beautifully written, complex, and bittersweet story that spans continents and eras. Macfarlane teases his story to the surface as meticulously as his sculptors (Michelangelo, Brancusi) extracted their forms from marble - and always with a vivid sense of place, from a small Ontario community to the hill towns of Carrera." - Daphne Kalotay, author of Russian Winter and Sight Reading on The Figures of Beauty "With The Figures of Beauty , Macfarlane traces a complex tale across pages that span huge tracts of time and distance. He takes away all hope, then chips purpose out of stone.

Tragedy, he suggests, is never pointless. And every single person, and every single thing, has a story. It's worth going down a lot of meandering paths to find out what those stories are." - The Globe and Mail on The Figures of Beauty "Macfarlane sculpts several disparate tales into a smooth, rock-solid whole. His ambitions are high, but in a language as rich as the fruits of the scenic landscapes in which he situates his characters and their stories, he pulls off a far grander narrative with skill and intrigue." - Vancouver Weekly on The Figures of Beauty " The Figures of Beauty is a rich, imaginative novel about art, life and beauty. It's epic in scale but intimate in tone, with Macfarlane's prose as crisp and pure as Carrara marble. One of the best novels I've read all year.

" - Ross King, author of Leonardo and The Last Supper on The Figures of Beauty "A meditation on the degree to which we mortals really lack much control over our lives.Sub-textually, Figures of Beauty is also an aesthetic treatise of the human impulse to make beauty, to create art. And Macfarlane tells this story in a deeply affecting way." - Toronto Star Praise for The Danger Tree: "About the best prose to ever come out of this country, for my money." - Alice Walker.