Palladio

In her small upstate New York town, Molly Howe is admired for her beauty, poise, and character, until one day a secret is exposed and she is cruelly ostracized. She escapes to Berkeley, where she finds solace in a young art student named John Wheelwright. They embark on an intense, all-consuming affair, until the day Molly disappears-again. A decade later, John is lured by the eccentric advertising visionary Mal Osbourne into a risky venture that threatens to eviscerate every concept, slogan, and gimmick exported by Madison Avenue. And much to Johns amazement, one of the many swept into Osbournes creative vortex is the woman who left him devastated so many years before.

"Dee has obviously learned some tricks from Updike, which he puts to good use as a painter of Molly's hometown....Though his message is bleak, his measured, textured prose sustains tension, and the depth and unflinching honesty of his characterizations grant the narrative integrity and strong emotional power." Publishers Weekly

"A vastly impressive book....Dee has given us a full rich cultural chronicle." The New York Times Book Review

"Dee perceptively explores the reciprocity of private manias and decadent social trends...dramatizing piquant questions of authenticity and mendacity, purity and depravity, leadership and despotism, love and manipulation." Donna Seaman, Booklist

"[M]asterfully rendered....The novel is at times humorous, especially in Dee's portrayal of the deeply cynical world of advertising....At other times, the novel is harrowing, as in Dee's depiction of Molly's childhood....Enthusiastically recommended..." Library Journal

"Pure literary entertainment....Palladio has narrative drive and energy, dramatic characters and conflicts, easygoing prose...humor and drama." The Denver Post

"Dee unites a gripping love story with an ambitious novel of ideas." Newsday

"In gorgeous language, hypnotic as a fairy tale...Palladio takes the moral temperature of our times." Newark Star-Ledger

"Palladio shocks, delights and invigorates." The Seattle Times

"Dee is always able to locate the abstract in the concrete....A Tribeca studio or a small town abortion clinic or a Christian cultist sermon, are all equally interesting to him, and his clear, understated prose gives them a precise fictional life." The Boston Phoenix

"Robustly imagined." Time Out New York

When a secret is exposed and Molly Howe is cruelly ostracized, she escapes to Berkeley, where she finds a savior in a young art student named John Wheelwright. One day she disappears — again — not to be seen until a decade later in Manhattan, when John and she are both dawn to an eccentric advertising visionary. A Book Sense 76 Pick.

Jonathan Dee is the author of The Lover of History, The Liberty Campaign, and St. Famous. He lives in New York City.