"In the winter of 1952, twenty years before she publishes her first novel, just on the brink of a precipitous decline into poverty, and pregnant with her third child, the not-yet-renowned British author Penelope Fitzgerald goes to Fonseca, Mexico, with her young son Valpy at the invitation of two widowed sisters whose silver mine she hopes will be her family's saving grace. Her husband struggles with alcoholism, their literary journal is on the brink, and this is Penelope's last-ditch effort to secure material support. Financial desperation is a moral quandary for Penelope, who reveres the religious and scholarly ascetics that populate her family tree. But she longs to begin her own writing life"--

Winter 1952. Penelope Fitzgerald's husband is a struggling alcoholic, their literary journal is on the brink, and she is pregnant with their third child. Out of the blue she receives a letter from two spinster sisters named Delaney, distant relations with a silver mine, who dangle the possibility of an inheritance. Jessica Francis Kane's brilliantly imagined Fonseca fictionalizes Penelope's real and momentous trip to northern Mexico in pursuit of this legacy, a creative and practical lifeline. She leaves her two-year-old, Tina, with relatives and sails for New York with her six-year-old, Valpy, in tow. From there, mother and son take a bus all the way to . . . Fonseca. But when they arrive, nothing goes to plan. There are others vying for the Delaney money, and for three months, from Day of the Dead to Candlemas, Penelope must navigate a quixotic household and guide her impressionable son. More and more people, an ambitious American couple, various local entrepreneurs and artists (including Edward Hopper and his wife, Jo), and finally a handsome stranger who claims he is a Delaney