From the critically acclaimed author of Monticello and The Widow's
War comes a vividly rendered historical novel of love, loss, and
reinvention, set on Martha's Vineyard at the end of the nineteenth
century. Martha's Vineyard, 1898. In her first life, Ida Russell
had been a painter. Five years ago, she had confidently walked the
halls of Boston's renowned Museum School, enrolling in art courses
that were once deemed "unthinkable" for women to take, and showing
a budding talent for watercolors. But no more. Ida Russell is now
Ida Pease, resident of a seaside farm on Vineyard Haven, and wife
to Ezra, a once-charming man who has become an inattentive and
altogether unreliable husband. Ezra runs a salvage company in town
with his business partner, Mose Barstow, but he much prefers their
nightly card games at the local pub to his work in their Boston
office, not to mention filling haystacks and tending sheep on the
farm at home-duties that have fallen to Ida and their part-time
farmhand, Lem. Ida, meanwhile, has left her love for painting
behind. It comes as no surprise to Ida when Ezra is hours late for
a Thanksgiving dinner, only to leave abruptly for another
supposedly urgent business trip to Boston. But then something
unthinkable happens: a storm strikes and the ship carrying Ezra and
Mose sinks. In the wake of this shocking tragedy, Ida must settle
the affairs of Ezra's estate, a task that brings her to a familiar
face from her past-Henry Barstow, Mose's brother and executor. As
she joins Henry in sifting through the remnants of her husband's
life and work, Ida must learn to separate truth from lies and what
matters from what doesn't. Captured in rich, painterly
prose-piercing as a coastal gale and shimmering as sunlight on the
waves-Painting the Light is an arresting portrait of a woman, and a
considered meditation on grief, persistence, and reinvention.
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