Lush Lives

Lyon (The Groves) blends romance and family history with a scathing critique of the New York City art world in this sumptuous tale. Glory Hopkins, a Black queer painter, moves from Denver to the Harlem brownstone she’s inherited from her great-aunt Lucille. In the process of assessing Lucille’s belongings, she meets Parkie de Groot, a wealthy white woman who works for an auction house. As Parkie and Glory sift through the house’s moldered scrapbooks and artifacts, they begin an affair, their mutual attraction fueled and complicated by the professional possibilities they might provide each other. The stakes are raised after they find an unpublished manuscript that may have been written by Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen. Glory hopes to succeed as an artist and to get answers about her ancestors and the manuscript, but she has little patience for the cutthroat art scene, which seems to exist purely for the sake of people to be seen rather than to see art. “As far as Glory was concerned,” Lyon writes, “Chelsea was a shitshow. More evil than necessary.” With prose that turns on a dime from blistering to sensual, Lyon makes Glory an appealing and complex narrator. This is a treat. Agent: Jessica Alvarez, BookEnds Literary Agency. (Aug.)