Book excerpt: FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCA 'She wrote exciting plots . . . a writer of fearless originality' GUARDIAN 'This French Revolution epic is an overlooked classic' MELISSA KATSOULIS, THE TIMES 'No other popular writer has so triumphantly defied classification . . . ' MARGARET FORSTER '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.