Description: Set between 1928 and 1943, Our Arcadia opens as Nora Hartley and Lark Marin have bought a house together in Truro, on Cape Cod. Nora, 33, is a well-educated divorcee with two children -- Schuyler and Emily; Lark is 24, homosexual, and disaffected. They are looking to answer the question "How to Live?" ("the question of the day and, Nora would remind him, of the great Russian novel"). Their answer is to set-up house with like-minded people whom they hope to meet along the way -- which they do. The cast of characters includes Hortense Stone, an oversized lesbian painter with a voice "like apples and honey" who models herself after Gertrude Stein; Austin Park, an architect with whom Lark falls in love, even though Austin is in the process of moving from Provincetown to Manhattan as the book opens; Molly Harrison, a beautiful young painter, and Davis Munroe (her lover), a black gardner Molly meets when she is commissioned by his employer to paint him; and Leo Harmonica, a brilliant, irreverent, restless artist searching for his medium. Told in short, impressionistic chapters, Our Arcadia is about the intersection of life and art, the importance of friendships, the spoils of an excessively masculine culture (including war) and its contempt for what is feminine -- in men and women. Finally, it is about the redemtive power of imagination.

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