The Grinder of Lapis Lazuli
A Novel of the Medieval Scriptorium

About this book:

In the soot-stained heart of 1250 Paris, nineteen-year-old Denis grinds pigments for a master illuminator, his fingers permanently stained by the deadly blues, reds, and greens that bring sacred manuscripts to life. When a Venetian merchant delivers a goose-egg of lapis lazuli—fourteen ounces of stone from the mines of Badakhshan worth more than a merchant's house—Denis and his master embark on the perilous, secretive alchemy of turning rock into *ultramarinum*, the blue of the Virgin's mantle, the only pigment worthy of King Louis's new Sainte-Chapelle.

But the Guild of Saint Luke watches with predatory eyes, the Dominican inquisitors sniff for heresy in the resin fumes, and a rival master circles like a wolf. With a royal commission hanging by a thread and a Guild deadline of three days, Denis must coax the blue from the stone through a process as temperamental as prayer: kneading pigment into wax dough, washing it in lye under cover of darkness, praying the color releases before the grey dust swallows it forever. One wrong pressure of the pestle, one degree of heat too high, and forty gold florins dissolve into grey sludge—along with his master's shop, his own freedom, and perhaps their lives.

*The Grinder of Lapis Lazuli* is a luminous immersion into the lost world of the medieval scriptorium, where craft borders on sorcery and a single shade of blue can topple empires. For readers of *The Name of the Rose* and *Girl with a Pearl Earring*, this is historical fiction ground to its finest grain—visceral, precise, and glowing with the strange magic of making.