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Riverhead Hardcover
January 2012
On Sale: January 5, 2012
320 pages ISBN: 1594488134 EAN: 9781594488139 Kindle: B005ERIRO0 Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
A stunning story of love, sexual obsession, treachery, and
tragedy, about an artist and her most famous muse in Paris
between the world wars. 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.
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