The Other Olympia
Everyone looked at her.
Almost no one saw her.
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.
- What it is
- Part historical saga, part family mystery, with an art theft at its heart. It moves between a Paris studio in 1863 and a Brooklyn kitchen today, following one pearl through the hands of the women who kept it, a con man who came for it, and the two families who never stopped looking.
- For readers of
- Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Forgotten Garden and The Paris Library
- Settings
- Paris and Brooklyn, 1863–1883 · Rockaway, 1995–1997 · New York and Paris, 2026–2036
- Release
- January 2027, in paperback and Kindle. Pre-order links will appear here.
Manet's Olympia, explained
Who the model was, who was holding the flowers, and what in the novel is invented.
The real Victorine
Model, painter, and the two portraits at the Met that Rachel keeps going back to.
Can you read her name?
Page eleven of the plan, written in his grandfather's chess cipher.