Self-portrait with boy

Lu Rile is a young photographer in Brooklyn in the early 1990s, working three jobs to pay the bills and looking after her aging father. The warehouse where she lives is falling apart, and she fears it is about to be sold to developers. Her art is the one thing she is single-minded about.

While taking a self-portrait, Lu catches something behind her on film: a boy falling past her window to his death. The print that results is strikingly beautiful, the best work she has made. It could launch her career, but showing it is a harder choice than it looks.

The boy belonged to neighbors in her building, and his death draws all the residents close. Lu grows especially near to his mother, Kate. Sympathy, loneliness and a growing attraction bind the two women together, and Lu becomes more uneasy and guilty as the bond deepens.

She is pulled two ways, between using the photograph to get ahead and protecting a woman she has come to love. This is literary fiction with a moral pressure at its center, set in a neighborhood on the edge of gentrification. It looks at ambition, money and the cost of success, and at how complicated a close female friendship can become.