The last nude

 by Ellis Avery. Those eyes! Those lips! That hair! Tamara de Lempicka's iconic Jazz Age paintings that immortalize Rafaela Fano in her nude glory (especially The Dream and La Belle Rafaela) now see glittering, luminescent life in Avery's novel, a riveting lesbian love story of heart-stopping passion, rapture, and stunning duplicity. In 1920s Paris, Tamara, her world lost to WWI, is painting for anyone who'd lost a world, too . . . making our heaven myself, stroke by stroke. Avery (The Teahouse Fire, 2007) places lovers Tamara and Rafaela within a richly portrayed circle of cultural touchstones, including Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney, Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach, the American expat who published James Joyce's Ulysses and founded Shakespeare & Co., a bookstore-haven for artistic souls. Against that brightly pigmented background, this artist-model lovers' tale is as subtle and seductive as the silk Rafaela listens to with her hands as she designs a slip for her beloved, as stirring as Rafaela (whose survival depends on her beauty), radiant after her first sex for pleasure, seeing Paris, a rose-windowed city, and thinking, This always. Just this. Avery's breathtaking shimmer of first love and its aftermath will turn heads. --Booklist (Check Catalog)