Gangs of vigilantes harass women on the streets, so that the tap of prostitutes’ heels is replaced by the click of rosary beads. The luxury-loving citizens begin to impose a voluntary curfew of the mind, dress dully, and voluntarily offer up household treasures to be destroyed on the Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s a lesson in how easily people succumb to self-righteous militancy.Dunant weaves the strands of history with a love story about both love of a man, and of art. She has the thriller writer’s skill of leaving clues and reveals, at the right moment, secrets that throw new light on the protagonists.As far as talent is concerned, there is an irony in the luck of the draw.

The painter reaches Rome to find himself overshadowed by another new arrival from Florence – Michelangelo. Alessandra, who has devoted her life to painting, has to admit in a lyrical epilogue that her art had been only mediocre, a single voice lost inside a great chorus of others. Yet such, she reflects, was the sound of the chorus that to have been part of it was enough.Clare Colvin’s novel ‘The Mirror Makers’ is published by Hutchinson in June. Early in Richard Powers’s novel about race and music, physicist David Strom takes his sons to the Cloisters museum in New York and shows them the unicorn tapestry. Jonah sees it as a representation of a magnificent beast; Joseph sees its pain in captivity David makes them look more closely. The tapestry is of knots, “Little knots, tied in the clothing of time”. These are important things, even though the stock in trade of mediocre fiction.

The difficult thing is to find ways of talking about them that do not entangle your work in second-hand emotions. What Powers does, constantly, is embody technique in the events of the novel and the characters’ endlessly fascinating talk. This is a book about smart people arguing about what it means to be that smart, and that gifted.He also makes those events and that talk recursive, so things crop up in different forms throughout. Any detail may turn out to be the surface portion of a knot, tied below or sometimes tied in front of us. In one of the novel’s chronologically earliest scenes, the lonely David and the self-disciplined, self-improving Delia meet in the crowd at the black soprano Marian Anderson’s 1939 open-air concert in Washington.