Dinitia Smith

A modern retelling of The Golden Bowl by Henry James for fans of Sally Rooney and Danielle Steel. Enter the privileged Upper East Side homes where life is easy but no one can truly be at ease. Where expenses are trivial and the status quo is not to be disturbed by the truth. Where the loyalties of the Woodford family and their friends are repeatedly tested. Frederico, the holder of a meaningless Italian royal title and an equally meaningless job, is ready to dedicate himself entirely to his new wife. Emily, the willfully ignorant only child of a wealthy widower, could only be happier if her father found someone to marry too. Henry, still mourning his beloved wife, is devoted to his daughter and intent on plans to turn the old family estate into a museum to revive a failing town. Christina, Emily's gorgeous, enigmatic childhood friend, is nursing a secret wound from a past lover. And Jean, the curator knows everything, but wishes she didn't. When these characters come together, everyone's heart is at risk. In this compelling page-turner told from alternating perspectives, the Woodfords learn what and who they really cannot live without.

A Novel

The Prince

Based on the life of George Eliot, famed author of Middlemarch, this captivating account of Eliot’s passions and tribulations explores the nature of love in its many guises Dinitia Smith’s spellbinding novel recounts George Eliot’s honeymoon in Venice in June 1880 following her marriage to a handsome young man twenty years her junior. When she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death of George Henry Lewes, her beloved companion of twenty-six years. Eliot was bereft: left at the age of sixty to contemplate profound questions about her physical decline, her fading appeal, and the prospect of loneliness. In her youth, Mary Ann Evans—who would later be known as George Eliot—was a country girl, considered too plain to marry, so she educated herself in order to secure a livelihood. In an era when female novelists were objects of wonder, she became the most famous writer of her day—with a male nom de plume. The Honeymoon explores different kinds of love, and of the possibilities of redemption and happiness even in an imperfect union. Smith integrates historical truth with her own rich rendition of Eliot’s inner voice, crafting a page-turner that is as intelligent as it is gripping.

A Novel of George Eliot

The Honeymoon

The peaceful upstate New York town of Sparta is changed forever by the arrival of Dean Lily, an enigmatic amateur magician, who plies his seductive skills on the local women, and unleashes a destructive force hidden beneath the town's calm facade

The Illusionist

Based on the life of George Eliot, famed author of Middlemarch, this captivating account of Eliot's passions and tribulations explores the nature of love in its many guises Dinitia Smith's spellbinding novel recounts George Eliot's honeymoon in Venice in June 1880 following her marriage to a handsome young man twenty years her junior. When she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death of George Henry Lewes, her beloved companion of twenty-six years. Eliot was bereft: left at the age of sixty to contemplate profound questions about her physical decline, her fading appeal, and the prospect of loneliness. In her youth, Mary Ann Evans--who would later be known as George Eliot--was a country girl, considered too plain to marry, so she educated herself in order to secure a livelihood. In an era when female novelists were objects of wonder, she became the most famous writer of her day--with a male nom de plume. The Honeymoon explores different kinds of love, and of the possibilities of redemption and happiness even in an imperfect union. Smith integrates historical truth with her own rich rendition of Eliot's inner voice, crafting a page-turner that is as intelligent as it is gripping.

A Novel about George Eliot

A modern retelling of The Golden Bowl by Henry James for fans of Sally Rooney and Kate Atkinson. From their grand mansion on the Upper East Side to their magical private island in Long Island Sound, everything points to the Woodford family as being perfect and idyllic. Why, then, is there such tension in the air? Enter Federico, a penniless Italian prince who is about to marry Emily Woodford, the only child of the family’s widowed patriarch, Henry. When Emily's beautiful, enigmatic childhood friend, Christina, appears on the scene as a guest at their wedding, trouble begins, for she and the Prince once had a passionate affair. Henry, however, is also enchanted by Christina. Now both Emily and her father must face a new reality, and learn whom they can, or cannot, trust.

"Luke meets Michael Lieber in late-1960s college--and he immediately feels inferior to Michael's Jewish, darker, crazier, more risky intensity. And after graduation, flat-narrating Luke marries Grace and gets a job as a journalist ("That summer Grace and I were married. We moved to New York and I got a job as a reporter on one of the wire services") while Michael, moved to Detroit, works on the assembly-line of an automobile plant, organizing--or trying to--the workers on behalf of a splinter radical group that's going nowhere. After a bombing of company headquarters backfires (a night-guard is killed, Michael, implicated but not physically involved in the bombing, goes on the lam, fleeing Detroit by taxi for New York--where, the string played out, he finally kills himself. Luke, feeling more inauthentic than ever compared to Michael, starts a magazine article about his old friend's life and death; but he finally gives it up, the past too painful. "--Kirkus.

The Hard Rain

The Illusionist is the sensuous and haunting tale of Dean Lily, an amateur magician whose arrival in Sparta, New York, upsets the landscape of this small town on the wane. Dean, a master of the sleight of hand, is also a master of seduction and charm—which becomes apparent as he woos and wins the hearts of more than one of Sparta's female citizens. But the enigmatic newcomer has more to hide than the tricks of his trade—his mysterious identity as a transgendered person, and his closely guarded privacy arouse suspicion and jealousy—and while he cures Sparta of its midwinter ennui, he also unleashes a destructive force that rocks the foundations of this town to its core. Inspired in part by a true story, The Illusionist is a fiercely erotic novel that thwarts conventions of gender and love.

Dinitia Smith

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