Cress, who was able to communicate with trees in London, can also communicate with trees in Italy. Soon enough, Ulysses and his makeshift family - his ex-wife’s young daughter, Alys his friend Cress and a talking parrot named Claude - move to Italy, where Ulysses has inherited a large apartment that they convert into a thriving pensione. Their paths diverge, and he takes her words with him back to London, where he resumes working at a pub. She imparts life-changing wisdom about love and art and the city of Florence.

(We’re told early that he’s named after a winning greyhound, but sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.) We meet him as a young soldier in Italy in 1944 almost immediately he crosses paths with Evelyn Skinner, a 64-year-old lover of life and an enthusiastic art historian. Ulysses Temper is the modest, searching, wandering protagonist. Sarah Winman’s sweeping “Still Life” is a parade of small stories, intimate connections and complex characters whose lives illuminate the tedium and cataclysms of the 20th century. Momentous events occur, and sometimes we’re caught up in them, but we are - simultaneously, inescapably - the main characters in our own stories. Historical fiction hits closest to the bone when it illuminates what we know to be true: that we move through capital-H History, but in each moment, the spotlight shines brightest on the unremarkable details of our own lives.

Life by life