Aspiring artist Claire Laurent escapes to Tennessee after tragic events and strikes up a relationship with Sutton Monroe, an attorney with an equally tragic past, and all the while she strives to make an impact as an artist among Nashville's elite society of the 1860s.

Devastated by the loss of her older brother, Ernie, just before Christmas in 1938, gifted four-year-old artist Suzanna retains a painting she had intended to give him as a Christmas gift, a work considered by her descendants to be her finest in spite of her fame years later.

Earning the nickname Lady Agony was no minor achievement for Lady Agatha Bolingbroke. It required a great deal of effort to make herself so disagreeable but she did it for a good cause. The fewer invitations she receives, the more time she has to paint. Her mother, refusing to accept an unpopular daughter, insists on dragging her to every event of the season. To thwart her parents and to vent her frustration, Agatha creates a wicked alter ego: a caricaturist...

Penelope Grand has scrapped her failed career as an artist in Pittsburgh and moved back to Brooklyn to keep an eye on her ailing father. She's accepted that her future won't be what she'd dreamed, but now, as gentrification has completely reshaped her old neighborhood, even her past is unrecognizable. Old haunts have been razed, and wealthy white strangers have replaced every familiar face in Bed-Stuy. Even her mother, Mirella, has abandoned the family...