The Gallery of Vanished Husbands - Natasha Solomons

On her twenty-third birthday Juliet Montague comes home to find that both her husband and her most prized possession—her portrait, painted when she was nine—have disappeared. In the traditional suburban London Jewish community in which she lives, Juliet is now an agunah. Her husband has vanished without giving her a divorce, leaving her in lifelong limbo, unable to marry and looked upon with a mixture of sympathy and suspicion.

On Juliet Montague’s thirtieth birthday she heads to London, determined to have a good day and buy a badly needed refrigerator with money she has saved for months. On a walk along Bayswater Road, however, she sees a young artist working on a portrait of a girl and decides to buy that instead. The artist refuses to sell it, telling Juliet that what she wants is a portrait of herself, which he will paint for the same price. That meeting and that portrait change Juliet Montague’s life.

With two young children, a job at her father’s optical company, and her parents nearby, Juliet is firmly anchored in her traditional community. But her meeting with the painter Charlie Fussell, a talented and socially connected young man, launches them on a bold venture. Juliet has a talent for looking at pictures, for seeing art; Charlie has a talent for painting and travels in a circle of similarly talented artists. Juliet and the artists open Wednesday’s Gallery, and over the next decades she becomes the proprietor of the highly respected and successful gallery, an innovative and important figure in the London art world of the 1960s and the owner of scores of portraits painted by her artists. And through the gallery she comes into the life of the reclusive artist Max Langford, who, like her, is frozen by experiences that confine him; together they create a love that frees them to live more fully.

Natasha Solomons, a novelist and screenwriter, tells a good story and keeps the reader fully engaged in Juliet’s stories—her daring leap into a foreign world where she is never entirely at home and her uncomfortable home in the conventionalities of Chislehurst, always shadowed by her vanished husband and the damage he has left behind. If at times it’s necessary to willingly suspend disbelief and fill in some gaps and if the story moves a bit predictably, those are small distractions in a satisfying and well-paced book.