In mid-career, the celebrated Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer painted a girl wearing a turban and a pearl earring. This famous painting,"Girl with a Pearl Earring", has been called the Dutch Mona Lisa. Sometimes she appears to be smiling sensuously, while other times she seems unbearably sad...

History and fiction merge seamlessly in this luminous novel about artistic vision and sensual awakening as seen through the eyes of the young woman who was the inspiration behind one of Vermeer's finest paintings.

In seventeenth-century Delft, a strict social order reigns, dividing rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, master and servant. When sixteen-year-old Griet goes to work as a maid in the home of the city's most renowned painter, she is expected to know her place. But in the Vermeer household, dominated by his mercurial wife and her formidable mother, Griet soon catches the eye of the master. Captivated by Griet's quiet manner, intuitive spirit, and fascination with art, Vermeer begins to draw her into his world - a rarefied place of exotic color and dazzling light, shifting shadows, and unimaginable beauty.

As Griet becomes a vital part of Vermeer's work, their growing intimacy spreads tension and deceiption in the ordered household and even, as the scandal seeps out, ripples into the town beyond.

With its striking sense of period detail - vividly evoking a distant place and time - "Girl with a Pearl Earring" tells the tale of a young girl on the brink of womanhood, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with genius... even as she herself is immortalized on canvas.