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Also by Rachel Pastan:

In the Field, August 2022
Paperback / e-Book
In the Field, August 2021
Hardcover / e-Book
Alena, February 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Lady of the Snakes, January 2008
Hardcover
This Side of Married, June 2005
Paperback

ALENA
By: Rachel Pastan

Riverhead
February 2014
On Sale: January 23, 2014
Featuring: Bernard Augustin
320 pages
ISBN: 1594632472
EAN: 9781594632471
Kindle: B00DMCVZNE
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction

In an inspired restaging of Daphne du Maurier’s classic Rebecca, a young curator finds herself haunted by the legacy of her predecessor.

At the Venice Biennale, an aspiring assistant curator from the Midwest meets Bernard Augustin, the wealthy, enigmatic founder of the Nauk, a cutting-edge art museum on Cape Cod. It’s been two years since the tragic death of the Nauk’s chief curator, Augustin’s childhood friend and muse, Alena. When Augustin offers the position to our heroine (who, like du Maurier’s original, remains nameless) she dives at the chance—and quickly finds herself well out of her depth.

The Nauk echoes with phantoms of the past—a past obsessively preserved by the museum’s business manager and the rest of the staff. Their devotion to the memory of the charismatic Alena threatens to stifle the new curator’s efforts to realize her own creative vision, and her every move mires her more deeply in artistic, erotic, and emotional entanglements. When new evidence calls into question the circumstances of Alena’s death, her loyalty, integrity, and courage are put to the test, and shattering secrets surface.

Stirring and provocative, Alena is the result of a delicious visitation of one of the most popular novels of the twentieth century on a brilliant and inventive novelist of the twenty-first.

Media Buzz

NPR Books - February 5, 2014
Fresh Air - NPR - February 4, 2014