Natalie Lemle presents "Artifacts"

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ABOUT THE BOOK

For readers of The Cloisters and Counterfeit, Natalie Lemle’s debut novel offers an insider’s view into the world of stolen artifacts and the hidden networks that link museums to organized crime, when a woman is forced to remember the summer she spent on an archaeological dig in Italy, as everyone she knew then may now be in danger.

Successful trusts and estates attorney Lena Connolly is asked by a colleague to assist on a case: the Italian government claims an artifact was looted and sold to a museum illegally and is seeking repatriation. The object in question is a cup made of dichroic glass, which would have been rare even in Ancient Rome, let alone thousands of years later.

Lena has done everything she can to put the study abroad summer she spent on an archaeological dig in the Italian Alps behind her. Her dreams of being an archaeologist shattered when her mentor Cyrille disappeared and her enigmatic boyfriend Giamma went dark, but with this new case, the past comes roaring back.

Told in alternating timelines, Artifacts follows young Lena as she falls in love with both archaeology and Giamma on the streets of Torino while her adult self pieces together what truly happened on the dig, now a fully restored Roman villa with World Heritage status. The dichroic cup, Lena discovers, may have been taken from the very site she helped unearth.

Powerful and exuberant, Natalie Lemle’s Artifacts brings readers behind the museum glass and asks questions about cultural heritage and the historical preservation of our shared sense of humanity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Natalie Lemle studied classics and art history at Tufts University and earned an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. She is the founder of art_works, an art advisory connecting contemporary artists with global companies, and previously worked in corporate relations at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She serves on the boards of the ICA/Boston and the Associates of the Boston Public Library. She lives outside of Boston with her husband and two kids. Artifacts is her first novel. (Photo credit: Nicole Baas)

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Whitney holds a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Her short fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications including Vogue, The Telegraph, The Tatler, and Bellevue Literary Review. Her first novel, The Age of Light, based on the life of pioneering photographer Lee Miller, was published by Little, Brown (US) and Picador (UK) in February, 2019, and was a Boston Globe and IndieNext bestseller and named one of the best books of 2019 by Parade, Glamour Magazine, Real Simple, Refinery 29, Booklist and Yahoo. Internationally, The Age of Light won Le prix Rive Gauche à Paris, was a coups de couer selection from the American Library in Paris, and has been published in over a dozen other countries. Whitney is the recipient of a 2020 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Fellowship in Fiction, and has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts and Ragdale. She teaches fiction in the Boston area and is a co-founder of the Arlington Author Salon, a quarterly reading series. She lives with her husband and daughter in Arlington, MA, where she is at work on her second novel.

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