Clara Mayfield is back - the irrepressible Jamaican heroine of Joseph Olshan's award-winning Clara's Heart. At 75, Clara comes to the emotional rescue of Will Kaplan, a character from Olshan's previous novel Night Swimmer, now a cartographer based in Vermont, the site of his brother Daniel's fatal skiing accident. Aware that to the outside world 'an elderly black woman and a young white man didn't add up', Clara knows that she and Will are tied into a bond as strong as any blood family's, and Will now needs his old nanny's wit and heart more than ever. A friend, Marie Claire, who was supposed to have joined Will in Venice may have been caught in the catastrophic jumbo-jet crash off Long Island. Yet mysteriously her very boarding of the doomed plane is thrown into doubt. So where is she? Interweaving the narrative threads with spellbinding agility, Olshan shows how it's possible to choose for yourself a family other than the one you were born to, and how past personal failings, with love, may be forged into redemptive new beginnings.