Villa E

Alison (The Sisters Antipodes) serves up an elegant meditation on aging, art, and nature, inspired by a famous villa in the French Riviera. In 1965, architect Le Grand, a thinly veiled Le Corbusier, makes frequent visits from Paris to the cabin he built steps from the Villa E, which was designed and built in 1929 by fledgling architect Eileen, who hasn’t seen the place since she sold it 10 years earlier. Alison hints at the house’s “sordid history” (the real villa, built by furniture designer Eileen Gray, was defaced by Le Corbusier after he recognized his influence on Gray’s design) when a nostalgic Eileen decides to pay a visit. Elliptical passages detail Le Grand’s consuming work schedule and failing health and Eileen’s reminiscences about the villa and her artistic growth in the intervening years. In the buildup to their reunion, Alison reveals why Le Grand remains obsessed with Villa E and why Eileen turned her back on it. The star of the show is the seascape, the power and beauty of which Alison depicts in lyrical prose (“In the cove, waves rush through, wash through pebbles, are pulled back to the sea, rush through pebbles again, and this happens today and has happened for millennia”). Readers are in for a treat. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (Aug.)