The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith

In a novel about an art forgery and the various forgeries, or reincarnations, of three people linked by one paining across more than three centuries, Smith's Last Painting (Sarah Crichton Books, 2016) offers a master class in the use of painterly detail to build a canvas of prose images. Sentences like this one abound: “The girl had been lavished with very fine brushwork, the hem of her dress frayed by a hundred filaments of paint, each one half the width of a human hair.” Couple that sort of close attention to painting and jazz clubs and and human behavior with a meticulously constructed plot and the near-universal praise for this novel is no surprise. —Laura Moretz