The Last Nude

Paris in 1927 offers Rafaela Fano glamour at a distance and uncertainty up close. When painter Tamara de Lempicka invites her to model, the young American sees a way out of an increasingly precarious situation. Their collaboration becomes an affair, and Rafaela's image enters the paintings that will help define Tamara's reputation. Being desired, represented and depended upon by the same person brings its own complications. Behind the artist's polished confidence lie appetites and ambitions Rafaela cannot easily measure. Set amid the artistic and social world of interwar Paris, the novel follows an intimacy shaped by unequal power, the making of art and the limits of what one lover can promise another.