A sensuous, heartbreaking novel about art, beauty and the choices we make that define us for life, from the author of the Giller Prize finalist Summer Gone.
A young man travels to Paris in 1968, where a series of unlikely events take him to a tiny village in Italy-and the one great love of his life. A marble merchant meets a couple on their honeymoon, introducing them to the sensual beauty of Carrara. An Italian woman arrives in Canada to find the father she never knew. A terrible accident in a marble quarry changes the course of a young boy's life and, ultimately, sets in motion each of these stories, which Macfarlane masterfully shapes into a magnificent whole.
Oliver Hughson falls in love with wild, bohemian Anna over the course of one glorious summer in Italy. Bound by a sense of responsibility to his adoptive parents back home in Canada, however, he leaves her, an act he will regret for the rest of his life. Narrated by the daughter he never knew he had, The Figures of Beauty is a love story of mythic proportions. Through luck, fate and great good fortune, Oliver found the one place and the one woman he should never have left. This is the story of him trying to find his way back.

David Macfarlane is the author of the acclaimed family memoir of Newfoundland, The Danger Tree, which won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Non-Fiction in 1992. He began his career as a writer and editor with Weekend Magazine and has since been published in Saturday Night, Maclean's, Toronto Life, and Books in Canada. He is the recipient of eleven National Magazine Awards, the Sovereign Award for Magazine Journalism, an Author's Award for Magazine Writing, and a recent national newspaper award for his weekly column in The Globe and Mail. He has written and produced a documentary and won a Gemini for his television work. In 1999, Summer Gone was nominated for the Giller Prize and in 2000 it was the co-winner of the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award.

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