The lyrically told story of one of the world's greatest artists finding his
true calling Though Vincent van Gogh is one of the most popular painters of
all time, we know very little about a ten-month period in the painter's
youth when he and his brother, Theo, broke off all contact. In The Season
of Migration, Nellie Hermann conjures this period in a profoundly
imaginative, original, and heartbreaking vision of Van Gogh's early years,
before he became the artist we know today. In December 1878, Vincent van
Gogh arrives in the coal-mining village of Petit Wasmes in the Borinage
region of Belgium, a blasted and hopeless landscape of hovels and slag
heaps and mining machinery. Not yet the artist he is destined to become,
Vincent arrives as an ersatz preacher, barely sanctioned by church
authorities but ordained in his own mind and heart by a desperate and
mistaken spiritual vocation. But what Vincent experiences in the Borinage
will change him. Coming to preach a useless gospel he thought he knew and
believed, he learns about love, suffering, and beauty, ultimately coming to
see the world anew and finding the divine not in religion but in our fallen
human world. In startlingly beautiful and powerful language, Hermann
transforms our understanding of Van Gogh and the redemptive power of art.