New Mexico, 1985. Brigid Long Night, a young half-Navajo painter, goes to work as an assistant for the elderly Georgia O’Keeffe. Haunted by the decision to give up her newborn daughter for adoption, Brigid struggles with the direction and inertia of her life. With O’Keeffe’s encouragement, Brigid develops a powerful style, incorporating language and wordplay as well as image in her portrayal of Native American life and her place in it. Atlanta, 1995. Nancy Diamond, an aspiring playwright, encounters Brigid’s work and begins to understand the hidden truths about her own life as the child born of an affair between her white mother and an African American artist. New York City, 2001. Sasha Hernandez enrolls at Columbia University to study filmmaking. She has only recently discovered that her mother, living in Manhattan, is a celebrated painter and sculptor whose work is installed in the sculpture garden at the World Trade Center. In Liza Wieland’s deeply moving novel, these interwoven stories show how art reveals the depth and complexity of human love, in all its betrayals and losses, beauty and redemption.
