"This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the reading's done. In his earlier, award-winning novels, Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. Now, in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, he deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape...

Believing that her prayers to God to bring her husband home from his job on an offshore oil rig caused an accident that left him paralyzed, a pious, young Scottish woman, tragically submits to his wish that she take on other lovers, convinced that this will aid in his recovery.

"A landmark exploration of the engaging network of relationships among genre painters of the Dutch Golden Age. The genre painting of the Dutch Golden Age between 1650 and 1675 ranks among the highest pinnacles of Western European art. The virtuosity of these works, as this book demonstrates, was achieved in part thanks to a vibrant artistic rivalry among numerous first-rate genre painters working in different cities across the Dutch Republic. They...