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Forgery
The spellbinding new novel from the award-winning author of The Caprices and A Carnivore’s Inquiry transports us to a mysterious world of deception, political intrigue, and desire. In the summer of 1963, American Rupert Brigg travels to Greece to collect classical pieces for his Uncle William’s art collection. Rupert’s first discovery, however, is that Athens is a shadowy place that hides a tangle of fork-tongued diplomacy and duplicitous women, a city of replicas and composites that, like a hall of mirrors, calls to question what is real and what is false. Journeying to the secluded island of Aspros, among a circle of artists and aristocrats each with their own secrets, Rupert finds the very pieces he’s searching for, but can he escape the tragedy that ended his brief marriage? As beautiful as Rupert’s discoveries are, beneath the surface lurk rumors of insurrection, fabrication, and even murder. Seductive, compelling, and sly, Forgery is a sophisticated book about the value and meaning of art, love and the corrosive power of grief.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
1 person is currently reading
100 people want to read
About the author
Sabina Murray
17 books83 followersSabina Murray was born in 1968 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She is of mixed parentage—her mother a Filipina from Manila, her father a former Jesuit scholastic turned anthropologist from Boston. Her parents met in Washington DC, where both were pursuing graduate degrees. At the age of two she moved to Perth with her family, when her father accepted a position at the University of Western Australia. In 1980 the family moved again, this time to Manila, to be closer to her mother’s family. Although Sabina Murray is an American citizen, she did not live again in the United States until she attended college. She feels that she moves easily through the various cultures that have forged her own identity: Australian, Filipino, and American. She now lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her family, where she directs, and teaches in, the Creative Writing Program at Umass.
In 1989, Murray’s novel, Slow Burn, set in the decadent Manila of the mid-eighties, was accepted for publication, when Murray was twenty years old. Later, she attended the University of Texas at Austin where she started work on The Caprices, a short story collection that explores the Pacific Campaign of WWII. In 1999, Murray left Texas for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. In January, 2002, Murray published The Caprices, which won the PEN Faulkner Award.
Murray’s next novel, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, follows Katherine Shea, a woman of strange appetites, as she moves from man to man ruminating on the nature of cannibalism in western history, literature and art. The book is a dark comedy that is concerned with power and hunger. Forgery is her most recent book, and this looks at authenticity by following Rupert Brigg, who is exploring art and escaping grief in Greece in the early sixties. Both novels were Chicago Tribune Best Books.
Her most recent book, Tales of The New World, a collection of short stories with an interest in explorers, was released by Grove/Black Cat in November, 2011. She is hard at work on a novel that looks at the friendship between the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement and the artist Herbert Ward.
Murray is also a screenwriter and wrote the script for the film Beautiful Country, released in 2005. Beautiful Country follows the story of Binh, a young Amerasian man who comes to the U.S. from Vietnam in search of the father he never knew. Terrence Malick commissioned Murray to write the screenplay.
Murray has been a Michener Fellow at UT Austin, a Bunting fellow at Radcliffe, a Guggenheim Fellow, and has received the PEN/Faulkner Award, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, a Umass Research and Creativity Award, and a Fred Brown Award for The Novel from the University of Pittsburgh. Beautiful Country was nominated for a Golden Bear and the screenplay was nominated for an Amanda Award (the Norwegian Oscars!) and an Independent Spirit Award.
In 1989, Murray’s novel, Slow Burn, set in the decadent Manila of the mid-eighties, was accepted for publication, when Murray was twenty years old. Later, she attended the University of Texas at Austin where she started work on The Caprices, a short story collection that explores the Pacific Campaign of WWII. In 1999, Murray left Texas for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. In January, 2002, Murray published The Caprices, which won the PEN Faulkner Award.
Murray’s next novel, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, follows Katherine Shea, a woman of strange appetites, as she moves from man to man ruminating on the nature of cannibalism in western history, literature and art. The book is a dark comedy that is concerned with power and hunger. Forgery is her most recent book, and this looks at authenticity by following Rupert Brigg, who is exploring art and escaping grief in Greece in the early sixties. Both novels were Chicago Tribune Best Books.
Her most recent book, Tales of The New World, a collection of short stories with an interest in explorers, was released by Grove/Black Cat in November, 2011. She is hard at work on a novel that looks at the friendship between the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement and the artist Herbert Ward.
Murray is also a screenwriter and wrote the script for the film Beautiful Country, released in 2005. Beautiful Country follows the story of Binh, a young Amerasian man who comes to the U.S. from Vietnam in search of the father he never knew. Terrence Malick commissioned Murray to write the screenplay.
Murray has been a Michener Fellow at UT Austin, a Bunting fellow at Radcliffe, a Guggenheim Fellow, and has received the PEN/Faulkner Award, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, a Umass Research and Creativity Award, and a Fred Brown Award for The Novel from the University of Pittsburgh. Beautiful Country was nominated for a Golden Bear and the screenplay was nominated for an Amanda Award (the Norwegian Oscars!) and an Independent Spirit Award.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 20, 2025
cancel Nikos and greek men !
September 7, 2013
In the mid-1960s, following the death of his two-year-old son and the collapse of his marriage, antiques expert Rupert Brigg is sent by his rich "uncle" (in fact his father) to a remote Greek island, Aspros, charged with finding some antiquities to add to the "uncle's" collection. Of course, the "uncle" intends this trip less as a business venture than as a means of healing -- an opportunity for Rupert to reforge himself after his disintegration, as it were. What Rupert finds, aside from satisfactorily faked antiquities, are sexual misadventures and a house full of squabbling, hard-drinking oddballs, some of whom become his new (and, we anticipate, lifelong) friends and with one of whom, the terminal ill Olivia, he falls in love and later, in the months before her death, marries. Thereafter, he sets up in rural Vermont an antiques business that fails when his dumped teenage mistress burns down the barn where he stores his stock; in a sense, that's a ritual cleansing by fire, enabling him finally to step away from the unfulfilling, grief-stoked, robotically hedonistic life he's been leading . . .
I'm not quite sure why I enjoyed this book as much as I did. With a plot that often seems aimless, full of incidents that, while curious and interesting, eventually lead nowhere, this reads more like a memoir than a novel. Yet it succeeded in absorbing me as much as any thriller. The writing's detached and deceptively plain, so that sometimes I found that I'd read a particularly perceptive or just delightfully witty flourish without at first recognizing it as such. Some of the events are dramatic, but (with the exception of a presumed murder that happens offstage and is never entirely solved, and is thus merely an incidental to the plot) they're drama of the kind you might expect from someone's account of a particularly outrageous vacation. Rupert, who narrates, is not a wholly admirable nor even an altogether likeable character . . .
Despite all this, I found myself reading late into the night, and came away from the book feeling as if I'd lived it rather than merely read it. I suspect the mood of this novel will remain in my memory long after I've forgotten its details.
I'm not quite sure why I enjoyed this book as much as I did. With a plot that often seems aimless, full of incidents that, while curious and interesting, eventually lead nowhere, this reads more like a memoir than a novel. Yet it succeeded in absorbing me as much as any thriller. The writing's detached and deceptively plain, so that sometimes I found that I'd read a particularly perceptive or just delightfully witty flourish without at first recognizing it as such. Some of the events are dramatic, but (with the exception of a presumed murder that happens offstage and is never entirely solved, and is thus merely an incidental to the plot) they're drama of the kind you might expect from someone's account of a particularly outrageous vacation. Rupert, who narrates, is not a wholly admirable nor even an altogether likeable character . . .
Despite all this, I found myself reading late into the night, and came away from the book feeling as if I'd lived it rather than merely read it. I suspect the mood of this novel will remain in my memory long after I've forgotten its details.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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December 25, 2007The spellbinding new novel from the award-winning author of The Caprices and A Carnivore’s Inquiry transports us to a mysteri...more [close:]
The spellbinding new novel from the award-winning author of The Caprices and A Carnivore’s Inquiry transports us to a mysterious world of deception, political intrigue, and desire. In the summer of 1963, American Rupert Brigg travels to Greece to collect classical pieces for his Uncle William’s art collection. Rupert’s first discovery, however, is that Athens is a shadowy place that hides a tangle of fork-tongued diplomacy and duplicitous women, a city of replicas and composites that, like a hall of mirrors, calls to question what is real and what is false. Journeying to the secluded island of Aspros, among a circle of artists and aristocrats each with their own secrets, Rupert finds the very pieces he’s searching for, but can he escape the tragedy that ended his brief marriage? As beautiful as Rupert’s discoveries are, beneath the surface lurk rumors of insurrection, fabrication, and even murder. Seductive, compelling, and sly, Forgery is a sophisticated book about the value and meaning of art, love and the corrosive power of grief.
November 8, 2019
It’s 1963 and a depressed American, Rupert Brigg, is sent by Uncle William to Greece for a summer working vacation. Rupert is recovering mainly from the death of his little boy, if one can, but also from the failed marriage. Rupert was in the business of art auctions with a specialty in furniture but on the Greece trip is looking for old coins or hopefully some statuary. He forges friendships with many people during this European summer and even finds himself enjoying part of it, and he even becomes nostalgic of particular moments before they are over.
With a book title like Forgery you know something will be amiss, but what? The title gives the book a feel of a mystery and it tends to dabble slightly in that area, particularly in the middle third of the novel. There are many forgeries here and some take a while to uncover. What is not a forgery is the good writing. This book will hold up well to a second reading, and perhaps then more layers will be uncovered. I wouldn’t say this is a great book, but certainly a very good one.
With a book title like Forgery you know something will be amiss, but what? The title gives the book a feel of a mystery and it tends to dabble slightly in that area, particularly in the middle third of the novel. There are many forgeries here and some take a while to uncover. What is not a forgery is the good writing. This book will hold up well to a second reading, and perhaps then more layers will be uncovered. I wouldn’t say this is a great book, but certainly a very good one.
October 7, 2008
While this book was an entertaining trip through 1960's Greece, it was not the thrilling ride I was hoping for. The protagonist is still recovering from his young son's death, and to some degree is posing, or perhaps you could say forging, a persona. But the metaphor really isn't stretched very far - Rupert is basically a handsome, well-off womanizer suffering from normal grief, who happens to be very skilled in dating antiques. He does meet some interesting people who have their own agendas, but nothing terribly earthshattering, or even very moving, takes place. I liked this writer's last book, A Carnivore's Inquiry, better, even though it was less stylish. At least that one took you on a ride.
May 30, 2010
I left this book a bit confused and not particularly moved. It was, overall, a rather neutral experience. I liked the main character at times, but I found him to be rather undeveloped. The other characters were largely undeveloped and some of them seemed to serve no purpose. The concept of going to Greece to look for artwork that may or may not be above board in its acquisition did not seem to present a moral dilemma to the main character. However, other things did, that to me would be far less worrisome. I wish that the author had developed the back story more, as the tragedy that led to his child dying and his marriage dissolving, might have enabled the author to develop the main story more.
February 15, 2010
Forgery is intriguing, but the intrigue doesn't amount to as much as I'd hoped.
Rupert Brigg is dispatched to Greece on a dual mission: find antiquities for his "uncle" and recover from grief over the death of his son. He seems most interested, however, in consuming an ocean of alcohol. Questions of authenticity and artifice run through his misadventures with a suspicious journalist, and angry artist and his promiscuous wife, and other vacationing intelligentsia.
The closing post-Greece chapters feel cursory, a rush to a slight conclusion.
Rupert Brigg is dispatched to Greece on a dual mission: find antiquities for his "uncle" and recover from grief over the death of his son. He seems most interested, however, in consuming an ocean of alcohol. Questions of authenticity and artifice run through his misadventures with a suspicious journalist, and angry artist and his promiscuous wife, and other vacationing intelligentsia.
The closing post-Greece chapters feel cursory, a rush to a slight conclusion.
November 10, 2014
Lots of drinking. Pretty sure they have a drink on every page.
Lots of sadness. But poetic sadness.
Lots of actually interesting stuff about art and art history.
Lots of stuff about Greece, namely goats.
It kind of reminds me of the Great Gatsby. Really, nothing much happens in this book. They all kind of laze around drinking, sometimes looking at art...but then suddenly someone dies and shit gets serious.
Definitely enjoyed it.
Lots of sadness. But poetic sadness.
Lots of actually interesting stuff about art and art history.
Lots of stuff about Greece, namely goats.
It kind of reminds me of the Great Gatsby. Really, nothing much happens in this book. They all kind of laze around drinking, sometimes looking at art...but then suddenly someone dies and shit gets serious.
Definitely enjoyed it.
November 6, 2012
The idea for this book is a good one, the setting beautiful, but the plot and characters are mind-numbing. If you like to read about people drinking and otherwise behaving badly, this book is for you.
One question. How does trash get published?
One question. How does trash get published?
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews