Toibin imagines the life of Henry James during a period of difficult transition in the author’s life. The novel explores the reserved and watchful nature of James who makes choices that isolate him from those he cares about the most. The lyrical writing and insightful details carried me along. You can read about how James created his novels from the everyday encounters of his life. The repressed sexuality and sense of cautious reserve led Janet Maslin to comment in a New York Times review on how the book expresses “the redemptive power of literature as a saving grace and the redemptive power of art to express what cannot otherwise be said.”

The author interviewed one of Japan’s most famous Geishas before writing this fascinating novel. She told him of her life with more candor than he ever expected. As you read this book you enter a world where appearances are everything, where girls are auctioned off to the highest bidder, where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men, and where love is scorned as an illusion. The woman whose story was told (and changed in a number of ways) in Golden’s novel, wrote her own autobiography called Geisha with photos and details of her life. These books carried me into a world that I had heard of, but never could have imagined.

Painter Michael Boone is trying to get his life back in order. He is a formerly “very famous” Australian artist whose art has fallen out of favor. He’s just been through a difficult divorce, and he’s responsible for his mentally handicapped brother Hugh. Michael is just beginning to paint again when a mysterious young woman walks into their lives and changes everything.

Jane has written a poetic elegy for an earlier way of life. She includes deeply-felt memories of her own family farm in Dracut and connects these thoughts of how “the land figures in our lives, our history, and our culture.”