Following the death of New York City painter Oscar Feldman, an artist known for his paintings of the female nude, two rival biographers set out to tell his life story, with the help of his wife Abigail, sister Maxine, and Teddy, his longtime mistress.

""Christensen is a forceful writer whose . . . prose is visceral and poetic. . . . She is a portrait artist, drawing in miniature, capturing the light within."-San Francisco Chronicle From the PEN-Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man comes a novel about grief, love, growing older, and the complications of family that is the story of a fifty-something woman who goes home-reluctantly-to Maine after the death of her mother. Can you ever truly go home again? An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she's a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall-until she's summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother's death. Then things really fall apart. Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreakingly serious characters-an arriviste sister, an alcoholi