I threw my neck out in the middle of Swan Lake last night.
So begins the tale of Kate Crane, a soloist in a celebrated New York City ballet company who is struggling to keep her place in a very demanding world. At every turn she is haunted by her close relationship with her younger sister, Gwen, a fellow company dancer whose career quickly surpassed Kate’s, but who has recently suffered a breakdown and returned home.
Alone for the first time in her life, Kate is anxious and full of guilt about the role she may have played in her sister’s collapse.
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Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Man Booker Prize Finalist 2011
Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
Berlin, 1939. The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, has been forbidden to play by the Nazis. Their young trumpet-player Hieronymus Falk, declared a musical genius by none other than Louis Armstrong, is arrested in a Paris café. He is never heard from again. He was twenty years old, a German citizen. And he was black.
Berlin, 1952. Falk is a jazz legend. Hot Time Swingers band members Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones,
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Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making
beautiful pots—which are then sold, collected, and handed on—he has a
particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of
264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know
who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.
And so begins this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke
and of his family,
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A stunning story of love, sexual obsession, treachery, and tragedy, about an artist and her most famous muse in Paris between the world wars.
Paris, 1927. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Struggling to support herself, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara’s most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished—and coveted—works of art. A season as the painter’s muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice.
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Richly drawn and sharply observed, A Nearly Perfect Copy is a smart and affecting novel of family and forgery set amidst the rarefied international art world.
Elm Howells has a loving family and a distinguished career at an elite Manhattan auction house. But after a tragic loss throws her into an emotional crisis, she pursues a reckless course of action that jeopardizes her personal and professional success. Meanwhile, talented artist Gabriel Connois wearies of remaining at the margins of the capricious Parisian art scene, and, desperate for recognition, he embarks on a scheme that threatens his burgeoning reputation.
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It’s the height of the Great Depression in Cascade, Massachusetts. Desdemona Hart’s aging father has lost everything but his treasured, now-shuttered Shakespeare Theatre. To put a roof over his head, Dez marries Asa Spaulding, the local pharmacist. Just out of art school, Dez must put aside her dreams of working in New York City and become a supportive wife, daughter, and—if Asa has his way—mother. When her father dies just two months later and deeds the playhouse to Asa, Dez realizes the extent of her mistake. She’s staring down a lifetime with a man she respects but doesn’t love, yet she can’t leave him without abandoning her father’s legacy.
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