Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selection.
"Spellbinding ... provocative, hypnotic ... spot-on authentic." - USA Today.
"The story unfolds beautifully, drawing the reader into the family drama, while Shapiro creates a sense of uneasy secrecy about Ruth and Clara's relationship by revealing only a few details at a time. Oprah's Book Club readers or fans of Jodi Picoult will enjoy this psychologically gripping book." - Library Journal.
Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to fourteen. At eighteen, Clara fled to the quiet obscurity of a small town in Maine where she married and raised a daughter. Now Ruth Dunne is dying, and Clara is summoned - and goes - to her bedside. And once again, Clara becomes the object of curiosity. As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro's novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart. Gripping, haunting, psychologically complex, this is Shapiro at her captivating best.