Shades of Emily (A Novel)

With more than a hundred years of history separating its two narrators—one of them a young lawyer in twenty-first-century New York, the other the famed early-twentieth-century artist Emily Carr—this magnetic new novel by bestselling author Leslie Howard offers a multigenerational story of love, ambition and breaking with convention.

The dark-hued painting that thirty-year-old lawyer Cassie Hastings has been commissioned to buy for millions at auction in New York City comes with a note taped to the back, containing a single line: “To my one true and everlasting love.” The identity of the intended recipient is a mystery, but both painting and message are unquestionably from the same source: the pioneering Canadian artist Emily Carr.

From here on in this engrossing new novel by bestselling author Leslie Howard, Cassie’s life—troubled by an insincere fiancé and a duplicitous colleague—becomes entwined in the experiences of the renowned artist, sending echoes back and forth over a gap of more than a century. As Cassie pursues the possibility that one of her own ancestors is the time-obscured recipient of Emily’s dedication, the tale forms a kind of double helix, with the two women alternating as narrator.

Displaying the attention to historical detail and psychological depth that drew widespread acclaim for her novels The Brideship Wife and The Celestial Wife, Howard conjures a vision of the pressures and heartbreak faced by generations of ambitious women, and the strength these challenges have summoned in them.

“It was as if the painter had two stories to tell,” Cassie notes while looking for the first time at the framed image of forest that will join her life to the illustrious artist’s, “one joyful, one sad, like something darker lurked behind the vivid, transcendent color.”