The Printmaker's Daughter: A Novel

Katherine Govier

nov 2011 · Harper Collins

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“A compulsively readable novel” about one of the world’s great unknown artists, who lived under her father’s shadow in the city that would become Tokyo (The Globe and Mail).

Oei is the mysterious daughter of master printmaker Hokusai, most famed for his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Recounting the story of her life, she plunges us into the colorful world of Edo, in which courtesans rub shoulders with poets, warriors consort with actors, and the arts flourish in an unprecedented moment of creative upheaval. Oei and Hokusai live among writers, novelists, tattoo artists, and prostitutes, evading the spies of the repressive shogunate as they work on Hokusai’s countless paintings and prints. Wielding her brush, rejecting domesticity in favor of dedication to the arts, Oei defies all expectations of womanhood—all but one. A dutiful daughter to the last, she will obey the will of her eccentric father, the man who created her and who, ultimately, will rob her of her place in history.

“From the hothouse ferment of art studios, bordellos, and Kabuki theater to the tonic countryside, Govier’s spectacularly detailed, eventful, and emotionally stormy novel is populated by vivid characters and charged with searing insights into Japanese history and the diabolically difficult lives of women and artists.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Lavishly researched and brilliant. . . . Govier astonishes throughout in her ability to write epic themes intimately, particularly in the lyrical, absorbing, and intense final hundred pages.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Published in Canada under the title The Ghost Brush

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Katherine Govier’s most recent novel, The Ghost Brush, was published in the United States as The Printmaker’s Daughter, and in translation in Romania, Spain, Quebec, and Japan. Her novel Creation was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has won the Marian Engel Award and the Toronto Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the Trillium Book Award. The author of twelve previous books, Katherine Govier divides her time between Toronto, Ontario, and Canmore, Alberta.