" The Renoir Girls is a dazzling achievement: heartbreaking, glamorous, elegiac, revelatory, and utterly gripping. It is simultaneously a portrait of Belle Époque Paris, the chronicle of a powerful French family in a world of palaces, estates and the late 19th-century high society of grand aristocrats and bankers, a story of great love, forbidden affairs and family secrets, a biography of Renoir and his artistic milieu, a history of France from Second Empire to World War Two, and the story of French Jews from the court of Napoleon III to the killing camps of the Holocaust - and at its heart are the extraordinary lives of three sisters and a famous painting. A tale with echoes of Proust and The Hare with Amber Eyes , it is deeply researched, beautifully written, delicious, haunting, and horribly timely." --Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The World: A Family History of Humanity "With The Renoir Girls , Catherine Ostler brilliantly exposes the darkness and latent violence beneath the glamour of Belle Époque Paris - revealing how antisemitism, social fracture, and the approaching catastrophe of war quietly undermine the surface elegance of a well-known painting." --Dame Hannah Rothschild DBE CBE "Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this engrossing book takes you straight to the heart of Belle Époque France, a world of grace, wit, and elegance. No one could know, as they conducted their love affairs and enjoyed their waltzes, how close they were dancing to the seething pits of murderous racial hatred." --Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny "An exquisite portrait of splendour, sacrifice, and suffering. What begins with a single Renoir painting of two young girls unfolds into an elegant, poignant sweep of 20th-century European history.

Ostler's masterful prose and groundbreaking research create a book with the richness of a novel and the authority of deep scholarship." --Natalie Livingstone, author of The Women of Rothschild: The Untold Story of the World's Most Famous Dynasty "I adore Ostler's evocative and lyrical writing that takes us through pivotal, changing times in history - from the Belle Époque to the world wars - with revelations (and beautiful writing) on art, family, and scandal. Ostler's deeply researched, scholarly but entertaining book is underpinned by a revelatory secret that will leave you gripped to the end." --Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art Without Men 'Through the drama of a single painting, Catherine Ostler has brought together a compelling work of family biography, Belle Époque French culture, and history of art set against the terror of world war and generational poison of antisemitism. Drawing on new archival research and family testimony, this is both a rich, global history and an intense, personal chronicle all flowing from Renoir's sublime portrait.' --Dr. Tristram Hunt, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum "This is a remarkable and haunting book, bringing the lives of the three young Jewish sisters, painted by Renoir in fin de siècle Paris, into extraordinary focus. It is a revelation.

" --Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes.