White Magic: A Novel

The setup is delicious: an elderly woman who systematically destroys every family relationship she has, alienating relatives who would gladly endure any insult, just to ensure her fortune goes to the nephew she hasn't seen in fourteen years. When Roger Wade, a painter fresh from Paris, returns to take possession of his inheritance - forty thousand dollars and six hundred acres of northern Jersey wilderness - he finds himself untethered from the life he built abroad and unmoored in the America that made him. What follows is a quiet study in reinvention and desire, as Roger navigates new artistic endeavors and unexpected relationships, particularly with a young woman named Rix, whose presence complicates everything he thought he wanted. Phillips writes with Henry James-like precision about the American impulse toward self-reinvention, asking what it actually costs to become someone new when the past keeps intruding.