Out of the Frame - Luca Aresu

He knows how to restore a painting to what it was. He has never known how to restore himself.

Lorenzo Ferrante is a conservator of Renaissance art in Florence - meticulous, solitary, rooted in the city his family has inhabited for generations. His life is organized around a single serious purpose: the laboratory on the Borgo San Jacopo, the pigments and the patience, the slow work of returning paintings to what they were always meant to be.

When Ellie Ward arrives from Portland with a watercolor set and three months to paint, she sees his laboratory - and his life - with the clear, unsparing eyes of someone who has never stopped long enough to stop looking. What follows is three months of morning coffee and UV light and the slow discovery of what has been buried under the surface of things.

But Ellie belongs to the road. And Lorenzo belongs to those stones.

And some distances, no matter how precisely you measure them, cannot be closed.

Beneath the surface of a five-hundred-year-old fresco, a hidden figure has been waiting to be found. Lorenzo has spent his career learning to see what others have covered, forgotten, or decided the composition was better without.

It will take him rather longer to learn to see himself.

Out of the Frame is a novel for readers who believe that paying attention is an act of love - and that the most important things are always the ones hidden just beneath the visible.

Some things, once seen, cannot be unseen.