San Salvador

An American in an Italian hill town is drawn into a household with a secret and a science that ought not to work. Mary Agnes Tincker was a New England Catholic novelist who lived many years in Italy, and this late book of hers mixes romance, theology and the occult. The town and the household are drawn from places she knew; the machinery is her own invention. Fifty-nine plates of quiet interiors and mothers with children, among them works by Mary Cassatt and Vilhelm Hammershøi, answer the novel's closed rooms and hidden domestic life.