New in 2026 . . . In the summer of 1870, the first year of the Franco-Prussian War, twenty-year-old Catherine duFour moves from Nancy to Paris, where she hopes to study art. She finds a room in a boardinghouse with an interesting cast of characters, including Theo Fontaine, who learned his craft, ukiyoe print-making, in Japan. Theo hires Catherine as an apprentice, introduces her to ukiyoe,and shows her prints by Hiroshige, one of its foremost practitioners. Catherine also spends time with fellow artist Ruth Levy and her rich family, including Émile, Ruth's louche but very handsome boulevadier brother. Meanwhile, the Prussians have put Paris under siege, and its residents are trapped. As time goes on, survival becomes more and more difficult. Catherine and the other residents of the boardinghouse are often cold and hungry; they search the streets of Paris for food to buy. At night. Catherine dreams of Hiroshige, then she encounters him in waking hours, and her world is increasingly transformed until . . .

Ann Elwood lives in a wooded mobile-home park in Fallbrook, California, with her dog, Eleanor, and her cat, Sophie. She has been a writer all her life and often made a living from it—as a copywriter for insurance and textbook companies, as a short-article writer for Irving Wallace and his son, David Wallichinsky (People’s Almanac and Book of Lists), and as a co-author of how-to books with Carol Orsag Madigan. In her spare time, she wrote novels. At loose ends in mid-life, she went to graduate school and earned a PhD in history with a plan to write best-selling history books. Her plan went awry. She spent the next 30 years teaching history at California State University and loving it. In 2024, she retired. Now she writes novels full time. At last. 

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