ELLIS AVERY

Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka.Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara''s most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished-and coveted-works of art. A season as the painter''s muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history''s darkening tide.Inspired by real events in de Lempicka''s history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Ellis Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, this is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance.

Set in the late nineteenth century at a turning point in Japan's relationship with the western world, The Teahouse Fire is the story of Aurelia, a young French-American girl who, after the death of her mother, finds herself lost and alone in Japan and in need of a new family. Knowing only a few words of Japanese she hides in a tea house and is adopted by the family who own it: gradually falling in love with both the tea ceremony and with her young mistress, Yukako. As Aurelia grows up she devotes herself to the family and its failing fortunes in the face of civil war and western intervention, and to Yukako's love affairs and subsequent marriage. But her feelings for her mistress are never reciprocated and as tensions mount in the household Aurelia begins to realise that to the world around her she will never be anything but a foreigner. Like Memoirs of a Geisha, The Teahouse Fire is an utterly convincing recreation of a now lost world and a fascinating insight into the intricacies and intimacies of the tea ceremony.

Una joven penetra en los secretos de la ancestral ceremonia del té, un ritual vedado a las mujeres durante siglos. Sensualidad, amor y amistad confluyen en un mundo marcado por el seductor ritual de la ceremonia del te y la tradicion de las geishas.

The story of two women whose lives intersect in late nineteenth century Japan, The Teahouse Fire is also a portrait of one of the most fascinating places and times in all of history-Japan as it opens its doors to the West. Told through the enchanting and unforgettable voice of Aurelia, an American orphan adopted by proprietors of a tea ceremony school, this is "a magisterial novel that is equal parts love story, imaginative history and bildungsroman, a story as alluring as it is powerful" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

When I was nine, in the city now called Kyoto, I changed my fate...What I asked for? Any life but this one.When Aurelia flees the fire that kills her missionary uncle and leaves her orphaned and alone in nineteenth-century Japan, she has no idea how quickly her wish will be answered. Knowing only a few words of Japanese she hides in a tea house and is adopted by the family who own it: gradually falling in love with both the tea ceremony and with her young mistress, Yukako.As Aurelia grows up she devotes herself to the family and its failing fortunes in the face of civil war and western intervention, and to Yukakos love affairs and subsequent marriage. But her feelings for her mistress are never reciprocated and as tensions mount in the household Aurelia begins to realise that to the world around her she will never be anything but an outsider.A lushly detailed, spellbinding story, The Teahouse Fire is an unforgettable debut.

Spellbinding and provocative, The Last Nude is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka.Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamaras most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished-and coveted-works of art. A season as the painters muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by historys darkening tide.