Showing results for "Tulips" in Action & Adventure

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam is a city in the grip of tulip mania, basking in the wealth it has generated. Sophia’s husband Cornelis, an ageing merchant, is among those grown rich from this exotic new flower. To celebrate, he commissions a talented young artist to paint him with his young bride. But as the portrait grows, so does the passion between Sophia and the painter; and as ambitions, desires and dreams breed an intricate deception, their reckless gamble propels their lives towards a thrilling and tragic conclusion.

My name is Luc Lenaghan, and I'm a man who knows mistakes. I'm especially skilled at making them. Bathing in them. Compounding them. But hell, being an expert in the matter means I know how to spot the opposite, too. Kari Macchio was the girl I met when she was only seven. We kissed when she was eighteen. We committed to each other when she was twenty-four. And we married when she was twenty-eight. Unfortunately, she was the woman I destroyed when she was thirty.

Ernie the information retriever sits in his office cubicle on the 50th floor of the FHQ building by day, and goes home to his wife and children in his apartment on the 25th floor at night. Sometimes, he sits alone in the dark movie theater on the 100th floor. In his heart, he wants something different, but he does not know what that difference would be. He just knows what he is presently experiencing is not it, and that knowledge fills him with shame and guilt. It is a no-win situation. Or is it?

The novel, a deceptively simple story, is set in Holland in 1672 during the amazing tulipmania of the 17th century that brought wealth to some and ruin to many. The story weaves the historical events surrounding the brutal murder of John de Witte and his brother Cornelius into a tale of romantic love. The novel is also a political allegory in which Dumas makes his case against tyranny and puts all his energies into creating a symbol of justice and tolerance: the fateful tulipa negra.

"The Black Tulip" is a historical novel written by Alexandre Dumas. The story begins with a historical event - the 1672 lynching of the Dutch Grand Pensionary (roughly equivalent to a modern Prime Minister) Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis, by a wild mob of their own countrymen - considered by many as one of the most painful episodes in Dutch history, described by Dumas with a dramatic intensity.