When Sam Solomon sees a stunning erotic drawing in the home of a dying art dealer, he is overwhelmed by a tide of confusion and longing. The dealer has hired Sam to write his memoirs yet withholds crucial information - information that Sam suspects 'Vanitas', the drawing, may hold answers to.

Clara Mayfield is back - the irrepressible Jamaican heroine of Joseph Olshan's award-winning Clara's Heart. At seventy-five, Clara comes to the emotional rescue of Will Kaplan, a character from Olshan's previous novel Nightswimmer, now a cartographer based in Vermont. Aware that to the outside world 'an elderly black woman and a young white man didn't add up', Clara knows that she and Will are tied into a bond as strong as any blood family's, and Will now needs his old nanny's wit and heart more than ever. Interweaving the narrative threads with spellbinding agility, Olshan shows how it's...

When David's mother brought Clara Mayfield from Jamaica to live in their affluent household, David told the exotic intruder to go back to where she came from. But the indomitable Clara would take no nonsense, and soon began to capture David's affections.

Ten years ago, Will's lover disappeared on a night swim in the Pacific. Was Will's emptiness a feeling of mourning or rejection? He now meets Sean, who is himself the object of a passionate fatal obsession. As they dodge one another, they move in a network of self-conscious, gym-obsessed men.