Madeline Vaughn-Alwin's picture-perfect life fades to gray when her childhood sweetheart perishes in the Great War. The aspiring painter leaves her wealthy New York family behind to travel across the country and start over in California. But when Maddie reaches Santa Fe, New Mexico, she halts her westward journey, certain she's found her new home amid the striking scenery and inspiring artistic community.

"A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum"-- Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother's plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father's life in America was circumscribed by his work...

Teenaged Wyn Davies took a shortcut through the woods in her New Hampshire hometown and became a cautionary tale. Twenty years later, divorced, she lives in New York making her living painting commissioned canvases of birch trees to match her clients' furnishings. Then she hears that Robby Rousseau, who has spent the past two decades in prison for a terrible crime against her, may be released based on new DNA evidence. Wyn agrees to be temporary caretaker...

It is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to the city of her youth for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a woman -- but above all she must seek release...

"I was born in rain and I will die in rain," begins Kate Braverman's The Incantation of Frida K., an imagined life journey of Frida Kahlo. The book opens and closes inside the mind of Frida K., at 46, on her deathbed, taking us through a kaleidoscope of memories and hallucinations where we shiver for two hundred pages on the threshold of life and death, dream and reality, truth and myth. Defiant and uncompromising, Frida bears the wounds of her body...

"Augusta and Owen are living a quiet country life of companionship and artistic creation--she a painter, he a writer--until Alison, a beautiful British woman, moves in to the previously unoccupied cottage next door. As Gus and Owen's life becomes intertwined with Alison's, past betrayals, losses, and new desires come to a head. A remarkably insightful, gorgeously written, unforgettable portrait of a marriage, of mature love, of desire, of regret,...

Revenge is a compelling and psychologically complex story of female friendship, art, and life. When a young painter moves next door to a world class novelist with writer's block, the two women become entwined in a novel described by Michael Cunningham as "compelling and darkly beautiful...Never less than gripping, Revenge builds to the realm of the genuinely revelatory."

Assigned, along with her new partner, to investigate the murders of three little girls, homicide detective Casey Martinelli closes in on a colony of mismatched people living in the wooded hills near San Francisco.