Emily has never been satisfied with the pious and rigid world she is expected to fit into, and when her creative talent and independent spirit refuse to be suppressed by her father's wishes that she marry and settle down, she defies her family's better judgement and travels to the wild coast of British Columbia.

"Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker--a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry's brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father's money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable...

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...

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism....

"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, the novel's hero, is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: a mother whose plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident and a father whose life in America was...

Reclusive Alexander Kinloch is called from his home in the wilds of Scotland to the death bed of his stepfather in London, not realizing that he is being drawn into the very dangerous company of polite society.

In the last years of Salazar's dictatorship, a struggling young artist is commissioned to paint the portrait of a wealthy client and struggles to capture his likeness while acknowleging his artistic limitations.

Freed from possession by the Drakhaoul, Gavril Nagarian finds himself imprisoned and slowly descending into madness, a situation that is complicated by the annexing of his undefended lands.