The Glass-Blowers - Daphne du Maurier

A glass-blower, remember, breathes life into a vessel, giving it shape and form and sometimes beauty; but he can, with that same breath, shatter and destroy it.

Sophie Duval reveals to her long-lost nephew the tragic story of their family.

The world of the glass-blowers has its own traditions, its own language – and its own rules. ‘If you marry into glass,’ Pierre Labbé warns his daughter. ‘you will say goodbye to everything familiar, and enter a closed world.’ But crashing into this world comes the violence and terror of the French Revolution, against which the family struggles to survive.

The Glass Blowers is a remarkable achievement – an imaginative and exciting reworking or du Maurier’s own family history.