A photographer retreats to a rustic cottage, where she confronts aging and flagging career prospects. Rebecca Winter is known for her Kitchen Counter series, black-and-white photographs capturing domestic minutia, taken as her marriage to a philandering Englishman is foundering on the shoals of mistaken assumptions. But, as her laconic and un-nurturing agent, TG, never fails to remind her, what has she done lately? Her photo royalties are in precipitous decline. Divorced, living in a high-priced Manhattan apartment, Rebecca, 60, finds herself unmoored. Her filmmaker son, Ben, still requires checks from Mom. Her mother, Bebe, is in the Jewish Home for the Aged and Infirm, where she spends her days playing piano pieces on any available surface, except an actual piano. Since the collapse of the family business, Rebecca has supported both her parents and now pays Bebe's nursing home bills. She figures that it will be cheaper to sublet her apartment and rent a ramshackle woodland cabin upstate than to continue to ape the NYC lifestyle of her formerly successful self. She meets the usual eccentrics who people so many fictional small towns, although in Quindlen's hands, these archetypes are convincingly corporeal. Sarah runs the English-themed Tea for Two cafe, not exactly to the taste of most locals. Until Rebecca came to town, Sarah's only regular was Tad, exboy soprano, now working clown. Sarah's ne'er-do-well husband, Kevin, sells Rebecca subpar firewood and is admonished by Jim, an upstanding local hero. After helping Rebecca remove a marauding raccoon, Jim helps her find work photographing wild birds. Like Rebecca, Jim is divorced and has onerous family responsibilities, in his case, his bipolar sister who requires constant surveillance. As Rebecca interacts with these townsfolk--and embarks on a new photo series--she begins to understand how provisional her former life--and self--really was. Occasionally profound, always engaging, but marred by a formulaic resolution in which rewards and punishments are meted out according to who ranks highest on the niceness scale.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Quindlen's (Every Last One) latest novel features Rebecca Winter, an award-winning photographer in her 60s who is seemingly at the end of a lucrative career. Rebecca has lived for years on royalties from some very successful photographs. Like many of her fellow baby boomers, she is balancing the need to support her elderly parents and help her son get established while dealing with a diminishing income. To save money, she rents out her pricey Manhattan apartment and moves to a shabby rental cottage in rural New York State. This move unexpectedly reinvigorates both her personal life and her photography. Carrington MacDuffie is a polished and effective narrator. -verdict Recommended for all public libraries. ["With spare, elegant prose, [Quindlen] crafts a poignant glimpse into the inner life of an aging woman," read the review of the Random hc," LJ 11/1/13.]-Mary Knapp, -Madison P.L., WI (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Quindlen's seventh novel, following Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, is a detailed exploration of creativity and the need for connection. Rebecca Winter is a 60-year-old photographer, once revered as a feminist icon, whose work isn't selling as briskly as it used to. She needs a fresh start after her marriage falls apart because her husband trades her in for a younger model (as he does every 10 years). She rents a cabin in the country while subletting her beloved New York City apartment, needing both the money and the space in which to find her creative spark again. Jim Bates, a local roofer who helps her with the challenges of moving into the cottage, becomes a new friend, as does a dog that seems to prefer living with her rather than with its neglectful owner. Rebecca also finds new objects to photograph in the series of homemade wooden crosses she discovers during hikes in the surrounding woods, without realizing their connection to a tragedy in Jim's life. Quindlen has always excelled at capturing telling details in a story, and she does so again in this quiet, powerful novel, showing the charged emotions that teem beneath the surface of daily life. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Rebecca Winter was once a famous photographer, and, with any luck, she will be again. Having achieved surprising early success with her feminist Kitchen Counter collection, Rebecca, now 60, finds herself on fame and fortune's flip side. With her former torrent of royalties dwindling to a trickle, Rebecca has been forced to give up her perfect Manhattan apartment for a paltry upstate cabin, and with marauding raccoons, stray dogs, and trigger-happy hunters, life in the country is proving to be no walk in Central Park. Luckily, Rebecca still has her camera, and she soon finds inspiration for new work in unexpected places, often in the company of a bird-watching roofer named Jim, whose quiet companionship proves to be just the balm she needs to fully embrace her unfamiliar surroundings. A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and star in the pantheon of domestic fiction (Every Last One, 2010), Quindlen presents instantly recognizable characters who may be appealingly warm and nonthreatening, but that only serves to drive home her potent message that it's never too late to embrace life's second chances.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Quindlen will hit the road with her latest novel, backed by a mammoth media promotional campaign.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist

THERE COMES A MOMENT in every novelist's career when she sloughs off the weight of the past - the conventions and obsessions, the stylistic fallbacks and linguistic tics, the influence of early masters - and ventures into new territory, breaking free into a marriage of tone and style, of plot and characterization, that's utterly her own. Anna Quindlen's marvelous romantic comedy of manners is just such a book. In "Still Life With Bread Crumbs," Quindlen achieves something distinctive, a feminist novel for a post-feminist age. Here she takes up a subject too rarely seen in contemporary fiction (not to mention contemporary Hollywood): the life of a woman who would once have been characterized as "of a certain age." At 60, Quindlen's complicated heroine, Rebecca Winter, is strong of body and mind, much less so of heart and bank account. In her late 30s, Rebecca made her name with a series of photographs chronicling her domestic life, which were taken up as landmarks of feminist art. The most famous image in the series, "Still Life With Bread Crumbs," featured "a vaguely Flemish composition of dirty wineglasses, stacked plates, the torn ends of two baguettes, and a dish towel singed at one corner by the gas stove." Reproduced on postcards, T-shirts and posters, it brought Rebecca unexpected fame. "For years she had lived off it and its satellites, the reprints and licensing, as well as its free-floating reputation.... It had paid her restaurant bills and her hairdresser tips and she hadn't even really noticed how much money it brought in until it started to dry up and then disappeared." Now all Rebecca has to show for that early success - and the popular work that came afterward, abstract images of her son, Ben - is the beautiful apartment, overlooking Central Park, that she bought with the proceeds. Her marriage to a caddish academic (at present ensconced with his fourth wife) dissolved long ago in the face of her fame. Her creativity also seems to have fled. "Ironically, great success made Rebecca less and less sure of herself, until everything she produced, even the successful things she produced, seemed like something she'd done before." Her son once jokingly referred to her as "the artist formerly known as Rebecca Winter." In desperation, if not outright panic, she has sublet the apartment - "her true home, her beloved home, or, as her accountant called it, her greatest illiquid asset" - at the "accepted exorbitant New York rate" and rented a dilapidated cottage in the countryside far north of Manhattan for a fraction of the price, in the hopes that she can pull herself together, both financially and artistically. But the calm and quiet unnerve rather than settle her: "She didn't find it peaceful in the least, more like the TV with the mute button pressed on the remote. Empty." She finds herself "doing math in her mind, the math she did almost every day. Fifty-eight hundred for subletting the apartment, minus 1,000 for renting the cottage; 1,400 for the maintenance on the apartment." At night she lies in her lumpy, rented bed, trying to imagine herself finding a normal job, "managing a coffee shop, raising money for a hospital, anything with a regular paycheck. An office. She'd never worked in a real office." So pervasive is her worry that when she spies a bald eagle in the woods, "the shock of recognition was powerful; he looked exactly like money." But Rebecca's crisis is, ultimately, more existential than financial. Marriage and motherhood had fueled her work, trained her eye. The power of those early photographs came from rage, rage at her pompous husband, rage at herself for being misled into the sort of conventional marriage that involves staying home and cooking complicated French stews, then falling asleep on the couch, leaving behind a flotilla of dirty dishes. The Kitchen Counter series "was seen as an iconic moment in women's art. But in fact at the time she took those photographs Rebecca had just been tired, tired in that way a woman with a child and a husband and a house and a job and a life gets tired, so that it feels like a mild chronic illness." Now, for the first time, she needs to make her own way, both professionally and personally. She needs to produce art in order to live. That she does so comes as no surprise, but the manifold pleasures of this novel lie less in its turns of plot - and in the male companionship she may ultimately find - than in the wit and charm with which the story unfolds. In previous novels, Quindlen has often employed first-person narration - to particularly great effect in her harrowing 1998 best seller, "Black and Blue," a pitch-perfect account of a woman's flight from her brutal, abusive husband - but here she has wisely adopted a wry, omniscient approach, moving back and forth in time. ("'Peter is so European,' women would say, and later Rebecca wondered if that was their way of telling her that he slept around. But that was later.") Quindlen's previous novels have often taken their subjects from her concerns as a reporter and columnist, for this newspaper and for Newsweek magazine. Her coverage of what can generally be defined as women's issues was no less trailblazing than Rebecca Winter's fictional photographs. When Quindlen's Public and Private appeared in The Times, she became only the third woman to write a regular column for the paper's Op-Ed page; hers was among the first voices chronicling the everyday challenges of American women. Taken as a whole, Quindlen's writings represent a generous and moving interrogation of women's experience across the lines of class and race. But her earlier novels - earnest and passionate as they are, demonstrating both heart and intellect - lack the qualities that have defined Quindlen's columns: humor and economy. Not so "Still Life With Bread Crumbs," which proves all the more moving because of its light, sophisticated humor. Quindlen's least overtly political novel, it packs perhaps the most serious punch. In her lovely 1998 book, "How Reading Changed My Life," Quindlen recalls reading Mary McCarthy's "The Group" for the first time: "Kay's suicide ... the sad settling that Dorothy makes of her life after her one sexual adventure.... the lives of intelligent women had to amount to more than this." In her new novel - a comedy in the style of Austen rather than a tragedy in that of McCarthy - she ultimately offers her heroine a life that amounts to much, a way to save both herself and someone else. In doing so, Quindlen has delivered a novel that will have staying power all its own. Anna Quindlen's comedy of manners is a feminist novel for a post-feminist age. JOANNA RAKOFF is the author of the novel "A Fortunate Age." Her memoir, "My Salinger Year," will be published in June.