Our book group meets on the last Wednesday of the month at 1pm. This month we are reading “The Secret Life of Sunflowers” by Marta Molnar.
When Hollywood auctioneer Emsley Wilson finds her famous grandmother’s diary while cleaning out her New York brownstone, the pages are full of surprises. The first surprise is that the diary isn’t her grandmother’s. It belongs to Johanna Bonger, Vincent van Gogh’s sister-in-law.
Johanna inherited Vincent van Gogh’s paintings. They were all she had, and they weren’t worth anything. She was a 28-year-old widow with a baby in the 1800s, without any means of supporting herself, living in Paris where she barely spoke the language. Yet she managed to introduce Vincent’s legacy to the world.
The inspiration couldn’t come at a better time for Emsley. With her business failing, an unexpected love turning up in her life, and family secrets unraveling, can she find answers in the past?
Marta Molnar is an avid art history enthusiast and a self-taught artist. She studied writing at Seton Hill University and Harvard University, lived around the world, then settled down in the Northeast United States where she writes in her version of Monet’s garden.