Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"Written in prose so clear that we absorb its images as if by mind meld, "The Last Painting" is gorgeous storytelling: wry, playful, and utterly alive, with an almost tactile awareness of the emotional contours of the human heart. Vividly detailed, acutely sensitive to stratifications of gender and class, it's fiction that keeps you up at night -- first because you're barreling through the book, then because you've slowed your pace to a crawl, savoring the suspense." -- Boston Globe

A New York Times Bestseller

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

A RARE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING LINKS THREE LIVES, ON THREE CONTINENTS, OVER THREE CENTURIES IN THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS , AN EXHILARATING NEW NOVEL FROM DOMINIC SMITH.

Amsterdam, 1631: Sara de Vos becomes the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the city's Guild of St. Luke. Though women do not paint landscapes (they are generally restricted to indoor subjects), a wintry outdoor scene haunts Sara: She cannot shake the image of a young girl from a nearby village, standing alone beside a silver birch at dusk, staring out at a group of skaters on the frozen river below. Defying the expectations of her time, she decides to paint it.

New York City, 1957: The only known surviving work of Sara de Vos, At the Edge of a Wood , hangs in the bedroom of a wealthy Manhattan lawyer, Marty de Groot, a descendant of the original owner. It is a beautiful but comfortless landscape. The lawyer's marriage is prominent but comfortless, too. When a struggling art history grad student, Ellie Shipley, agrees to forge the painting for a dubious art dealer, she finds herself entangled with its owner in ways no one could predict.

Sydney, 2000: Now a celebrated art historian and curator, Ellie Shipley is mounting an exhibition in her field of specialization: female painters of the Dutch Golden Age. When it becomes apparent that both the original At the Edge of a Wood and her forgery are en route to her museum, the life she has carefully constructed threatens to unravel entirely and irrevocably.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

The Dutch golden age is reimagined through a haunting landscape painting and three interwoven characters, timelines, and locales in this luminous audio adaptation of Smith's novel. In 1636, while grieving the death of her young daughter, artist Sara de Vos paints At the Edge of a Wood. The painting remains in the De Groot family for 300 years until it is stolen from wealthy Manhattanite Marty De Groot in 1958 and replaced with a forgery. An investigator leads Marty to Ellie Shipley, a local art history student and the creator of the fake. As Marty embarks on a deceptive relationship with Ellie, reader Ballerini's brilliant execution conveys the hesitancy, awkwardness, tension, and guile. Decades later, Marty and Ellie are reunited in Australia, where the appearance of both the original and the fake paintings threatens Ellie's career. Ballerini's versatility with intonation and timing convey the thrill of foreboding. His voice travels easily, equally confident in 17th-century Dutch life and in a 1950s New York jazz bar; he also segues seamlessly between American and Australian accents. This is an excellent audio. An FSG/Crichton hardcover. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In this wonderfully engaging novel, centered on the paintings of fictional seventeenth-century Dutch artist Sara de Vos, Smith immerses the reader in three vibrant time periods. In 1950s New York, a wealthy lawyer discovers his prized de Vos painting has been replaced with a fake, while the forger of the painting grapples with the moral complexities of her recent choices. Both characters reappear in the present day, as the profound effect of the painting on their lives becomes clear. Woven among these scenes are glimpses into the tragic life of de Vos, the first woman master painter admitted into the Guild of St. Luke in Holland. When the story begins, only her haunting winter landscape is known, but as the story progresses, more is revealed, including the inspirations for her greatest works. Rich in historical detail, the novel explores the immense challenges faced by women in the arts (past and present), provides a glimpse into the seedy underbelly of the art world across the centuries, and illustrates the transformative power and influence of great art. An outstanding achievement, filled with flawed and fascinating characters.--Price, Kerri Copyright 2016 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Smith's latest novel (Bright and Distant Shores, 2011, etc.) is a rich and detailed story that connects a 17th-century Dutch painting to its 20th-century American owner and the lonely but fervent art student who makes the life-changing decision to forge it.Marty de Groot, a Manhattan lawyer plagued by infertility and the stuffiness that comes from centuries of familial wealth, has one special thing to his name: a collection of 17th-century Dutch paintings, including rare pieces by female artists of the era. At the Edge of the Wood is the only work attributed to Sarah de Vos, and it's hung above the marital bed in Marty's Park Avenue triplex for generations. Until one fall day in 1957 it's plucked off his wall and replaced by a meticulously executed forgery. Behind this deception is not a mastermind but an Australian graduate student named Ellie Shipley, who was approached by a secretive art dealer to replicate the painting. Ellie lives and thinks like a member of the Dutch golden age, boiling rabbit pelts in her claustrophobic Brooklyn apartment for glue, pulling apart antique canvases to understand their bones, and building them up again layer by layer. This is a woman who sees herself in de Vos and would do anything to merge their legacies together. In showing how this is a monumental occasion in Ellie's life, a truly intimate experience for her, Smith turns forgery into art, replication into longing, deceit into an act of love: Ellie works in "topography, the impasto, the furrows where sable hairs were dragged into tiny painted crests to catch the light. Or the stray line of charcoal or chalk, glimpsed beneath a glaze that's three hundred years old." The narrative stretches from a period of grief in de Vos' life that compelled her to paint At the Edge of the Wood, to 1950s New York to the year 2000 at a museum in Sydney where original and forgery meetin turn reconnecting Ellie with Marty. "Here comes Marty de Groot, the wrecking ball of the past": just one example of the suspense Smith manages to carry throughout his narrative, suspense bound up in brilliant layers of paint and the people who dedicate their lives to appreciating its value.This is a beautiful, patient, and timeless book, one that builds upon centuries and shows how the smallest choiceslike the chosen mix for yellow paintcan be the definitive markings of an entire life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.