Author Description

This haunting and magical novel introduces us to Nathan Mann, the youngest of a family of hustlers and dreamers, whose memories of family history-even of his own early years-are a jumble of the unreliable and the confusing. When he visits his grandmother, Madeline, to fill in the gaps, she provides him with the best that she has to offer-a series of watercolors that hold the clues to the family's murky, elusive past. With these fragments, Nathan reconstructs his family's history and his childhood, discovering in the process the startling reasons their history has become so obscured in the first place.