The Masterpiece

Nationally acclaimed author Fiona Davis transports readers to the glitzy abandoned art school inside Grand Central Terminal in her most recent gripping book. There, two very different women, separated by fifty years, fight to make their mark in a world that is against them.

For the approximately nine million residents of New York City, Grand Central Terminal is a marvel of architecture and a crown gem. But it means something completely different to Virginia Clay and Clara Darden.

The terminal represents Clara's future, which she believes will be as brilliant as the stars hanging from the main concourse ceiling. Twenty-five-year-old Clara is a teacher at the esteemed Grand Central School of Art in 1928. She is a gifted illustrator who aspires to illustrate a Vogue cover, but the public's contempt for a "woman artist" is so great that not even the school's renown can save her. Clara is a bold, feisty, self-assured, and single-minded woman who is driven to succeed in all her artistic endeavours, even if she has to balance the desires of two men: a rich would-be poet and a talented experimental painter. However, she and her free-spirited companions are unaware that the Great Depression, an unquenchable beast capable of destroying the whole art scene, is about to take them by surprise. Furthermore, Clara won't be much helped by hunger or poverty when it comes to the larger tragedy that lies ahead.

In 1974, some fifty years later, the terminal's deterioration has been almost as abrupt as Virginia Clay's life's. Filthy and dangerous, with pickpockets and drug dealers prowling the floor and a roof blackened by smoke, Grand Central is at the centre of a bitter legal battle over whether the once-grand structure should be saved as a monument or torn down. It is, after all, Virginia's final option. She just got divorced and took a job at the information booth to help support herself and Ruby, her college-age daughter. Virginia's eyes are enlightened to the beauty hiding behind the deterioration, however, when she stumbles onto an abandoned art school within the station and finds a magnificent watercolour concealed under the dust. She sets out on an intense mission to track out the creator of the unsigned masterpiece, one that entails delving deeply into the mystery of the renowned 1920s illustrator Clara Darden, who vanished from the face of the earth in 1931, as well as the fight to save Grand Central.