Self-Portrait with Boy

By Rachel Lyon,

Book cover of Self-Portrait with Boy

Book description

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

“Fabulously written, this spellbinding debut novel is a real page-turner. A powerful, brilliantly imagined story” (Library Journal, starred review) about an ambitious young artist whose accidental photograph of a boy falling to his death could jumpstart her career, but devastate her…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Self-Portrait with Boy as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Lyon’s protagonist, Lu Rile, is a struggling, ambitious young photographer, living in a derelict Brooklyn warehouse that might soon be destroyed by real-estate developers. In order to somehow pay the rent while at the same time take care of her ill and aging father, she desperately juggles three jobs. When not at work, Lu is in the midst of creating a series of self-portraits of herself in the window of her loft, when she accidentally captures the image of a young boy, the son of her upstairs neighbors, falling to his death. (Shades of Antonioni’s famous film, Blow Up,…

From Phoebe's list on genre-bending artists: inside and out.

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