tinamans

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena’s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn’t even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I.

It's a fairy tale come true for Julia Jones, a stalled artist living in Boston's Old World Italian neighborhood, the North End. She's engaged to marry the impossibly wonderful (and impossibly wealthy) Asher Bartlett—in a Swiss castle, no less. And after the wedding, she'll get to ditch her dead-end job and go from being a sometime painter to a full-time artist.