The Hundred Waters

"Celebrated by the Boston Globe as "a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs," the seductively weird and darkly offbeat Lauren Acampora returns to the lush world that got us all hooked on the NPR Best Book of the Year The Wonder Garden, drawing us into the secret lives of a polished Connecticut haven and jolting us with the sparks that fly when those lives collide. Formerly a model and photographer trying to make it in New York, Louisa Rader is back in her affluent hometown of Nearwater, Connecticut, where she's married to a successful older architect, raising a preteen daughter, and trying to vitalize the provincial local art center. As the years pass, she's grown restless in her safe and comfortable routine, haunted by the flash of the life she used to live. When intense and intriguing young artist-environmentalist Gabriel arrives in town with his aristocratic family, his impact on the Raders has hothouse effects. As Gabriel pushes to realize his artistic vision for the world, he pulls both Louisa and her daughter Sylvie under his spell, with consequences that disrupt the Raders' world forever. A strange, sexy, and sinister novel of art and obsession, in The Hundred Waters Acampora gives us an incisive, page-turning story of ambition, despair, desire, and the price of fulfillment and freedom at all costs"--