Product Description: A man murdered during Katrina in a hotel room two blocks from her art-restoration studio was closely tied to a part of Johanna’s past that she would like kept secret. But missing from the crime scene is a valuable artwork painted in 1926 by a renowned Belgian artist that might bring it all back...read more

A novel of literary New York follows the lives of a cast of characters including editors, writers, and their friends over a five year period.

As she prepares dinner for her husband andtheir extended family, Suzanne hears on the radiothat a jetliner has crashed and her lover is dead.Alex Elling was a renowned orchestra conductor.Suzanne is a concert violist, long unsatisfied withher marriage to a composer whose music turnsemotion into thought. Now, more alone thanshe’s ever been, she must grieve secretly. But ascomplex as that effort is, it pales with the arrival ofAlex’s widow, who blackmails her into completingthe score for Alex’s unfinished viola concerto.As Suzanne struggles to keep her double life asecret from her husband, from her best friend,and from the other members of her quartet, sheis consumed by memories of a rich love affairsaturated with music. Increasingly manipulated byher lover’s widow and tormented by the concerto’smany layers, Suzanne realizes she may loseeverything she’s spent her life working for.A story of love, loss, sex, class, and betrayal,this psychologically compelling novel exploresthe ways that artists’ lives and work interact, thenature of relationships among women as friendsand competitors, and what it means to make a lifeof art.

Product Description: Scouring the world’s most remote fields and valleys, a dedicated Soviet scientist has spent his life collecting rare plants for his country’s premiere botanical institute in Leningrad. From Northern Africa to Afghanistan, from South America to Abyssinia, he has sought and saved seeds that could be traced back to the most ancient civilizations...read more