Natural Elements

In his first novel, The Drowning People (An Oxonian literary sensation--The New York Times Book Review), Richard Mason wrote about the ritualized world of the English upper class. Now, in his dazzling new novel, just published in England to great acclaim (Beautifully crafted; superbly drawn --The Times), Mason writes about mothers and daughters, aging and death, memory and longing, and about the high-stakes, full-tilt embrace of life. The setting is London. The time is the present. Mother and daughter are choosing an assisted-living facility. The mother, eighty years old, is a gifted amateur pianist. Recently, she has been experiencing a rich inner world that she hides from her daughter, a world she enters through the (seemingly magic) pedals of her piano. The daughter, Eloise, forty-eight, a hedge-fund manager, has bought up $130 million (a quarter of the hedge fund's capital) of a transition metal, based on a casual remark by her former lover, a French metallurgist--a genius of sorts--who worked for years on a compound for industrial use. If successful, it would more than double the value of Eloise's fund. But while mother and daughter are on the trip of a lifetime to South Africa--a gift from daughter to mother--Eloise learns that the price of the metal is in free fall. Staving off panic, Eloise puts in motion a bold gamble that risks everything--her future, the fund, her mother's well-being . . .