Historical fiction · January 2027
The Other Olympia
Everyone looked at her. Almost no one saw her.
Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Look at the woman holding the flowers. Her name was Laure, and that is nearly all anyone knows. This novel won’t pretend otherwise.
Paris, 1863. Victoria Durant, a silk-weaver’s daughter held by debt in a house in Pigalle, is bought free by Édouard Manet. While he paints the most scandalous nude in Paris, she paints her own, alone in a rented room in the Batignolles, with a queen’s pearl at her throat. Then she disappears from history.
Paris, 2026. Art-history student Rachel Novak is arrested for the theft of Olympia. The charming stranger who brought her to Paris chose her months before he ever said hello, and now he’s gone. Released but not cleared, she has a list on an airplane napkin. Number eight: Find him. But the trail doesn’t end in Paris. It leads home to Brooklyn, to her grandmother’s kitchen, and to a secret the women of her family have kept for a hundred and sixty years.
Some things are owned. Some are only kept. And the last decision in this story is hers.
A novel about who gets looked at, and who finally gets seen.
About the author