Tuesday Nights In 1980

New York, 1980. SoHo is rough, cheap and not yet fashionable, and it draws artists and writers hoping to be noticed. Two of them are at the center of this novel: James Bennett and Raul Engales.

James writes about art for The New York Times. He has synesthesia, a condition that lets him describe paintings in vivid, almost magical terms. Raul is a painter from Argentina who has left his country in exile, trying to outrun his past and the Dirty War that has engulfed his homeland.

Both men rise in the downtown art world. Then two separate tragedies hit, and each man is left with a loss that changes how he lives and how he sees and makes art.

Their paths cross through two people. Lucy Olliason is a beauty from a small town and Raul's muse. The other is a young orphan boy who arrives from Buenos Aires under mysterious circumstances. Through them, James and Raul begin to recover something of what they lost.

The novel is literary fiction with a strong sense of place, set in a specific neighborhood and moment. It follows several lives at once and leans toward grief and recovery rather than plot twists.