'Is Brussels always so quiet?' Nicolas asked, picking bits of wool off his tunic.

Not a lot of best-selling novels set in fifteenth-century Belgium, though I have to say I wasn't hugely satisfied with this one; bad boy artist Nicolas travels between Paris and Brussels impregnating young women, one of them the blind daughter of the weaver of the tapestry which he has designed. There's a fair bit about art and patterns of patronage and so on, but I felt the writer was a little too much in love with her irresponsible hero.