"Perhaps we shall not see each other again. I will write to you, though, and tell you, as best I can, the story of your family. A glass-blower, remember, breathes life into a vessel, giving it shape and form and sometimes beauty; but he can with that same breath, shatter and destroy it." Faithful to her word, Sophie Duval reveals to her long-lost nephew the tragic story of a family of master craftsmen in eighteenth-century France.
The world of the glass-blowers has its own traditions, it's own language - and its own rules. "If you marry into glass" Pierre Labbe warns his daughter, "you will say goodbye to everything familiar, and enter a closed world." But crashing into this world comes the violence and terror of the French Revolution against which, the family struggles to survive.
The Glass Blowers is a remarkable achievement - an imaginative and exciting reworking of du Maurier's own family history.