Black & White

Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling away from her mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter. At eighteen, even before graduating from high school, Clara fled to the quiet obscurity of a small town in Maine where she lives a very ordinary life with her husband and daughter. Now Ruth Dunne is dying, and Clara is summoned to her mother's bedside -- and once again, Clara becomes the object of curiosity. As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro's novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart.