The Last Beautiful Thing

Leo is forty-four, an acclaimed writer whose books describe intimacy with a precision his private life rarely sustains. A residency financed by the Valmont Foundation offers him a summer without a delivery date: private archives, coastal houses, dinners and journeys arranged around work he has yet to begin.
Sofia Valmont has chosen him for the project. Intelligent, exacting and accustomed to directing the lives around her, she wants him to examine what people do when nothing appears to be missing. Their attraction soon complicates the invitation. Leo can enter her houses and share her bed; the place he occupies in her life remains hers to determine.
As the summer moves from Rome and Capri to Mallorca, Paris, London and Venice, old acquaintances return with lives he has scarcely considered. A photographer records the pauses he would prefer to edit. Private letters raise questions about who may turn another person's experience into art. Behind each effortless arrival, someone else has done the work.
In the second book of The Last Beautiful Thing, desire carries practical and professional costs. Leo's reputation continues to grow while the people closest to him become harder to fit inside the stories he knows how to tell.