'Bending towards the painting, I'm caught by its beauty. She's added a cloud, a light of pink, rose, around the edges, which surely hadn't been here, visible, and yet she's made something splendid with these colours. The woman reading seems suffused with rose. She holds a sheaf of papers, and what she reads seems to have dissolved into grey and pink and white.
Something about this woman, half-suggested in oil, makes me bend toward her. "Who is this?" I ask myself, for I can't think it's me, and yet I know, with exquisite pleasure, that it is.'
A richly imagined novel exploring the life of famous American painter Mary Cassatt.
