THE LADY WAITING

The White Lotus meets The Talented Mr. Ripley in this rollicking novel of a stolen Vermeer, a Polish transplant in Los Angeles, and the mysterious couple who seduce her into a misguided international heist. Readers of Gary Shteyngart, Grace D. Li, and Patricia Highsmith will love this.

One afternoon in Los Angeles, a young Polish emigree named Viva is driving along the freeway when she's flagged down by a dazzling, disheveled woman in green chiffon. The woman is Roberta Sleeper, known as Bobby, a fellow Eastern European and would-be art gallerist with a sketchy background and even sketchier filmmaker husband. Within hours, the couple hire Viva as their assistant; within days, they enlist her as an accomplice in an improbable scheme involving a long-lost Vermeer masterwork, a multi-million-dollar reward, and several shadowy ex-husbands.

As Bobby and Sleeper weave her ever more tightly into their web, Viva is swept up in a caper that's one part art heist, one part love triangle, and one part education of a felon. Entranced by their lifestyle, alarmed by their ramshackle scam, Viva realizes she's out of her depthand that only luck, cunning, and her own hustler's instinct can save her from disaster.

Careening from the canyons of LA to the canals of Venice, THE LADY WAITING is a wildly entertaining, gleefully bawdy Swiftian caperand a showcase for three of the biggest and most unforgettable characters in recent fiction.

Magdalena Zyzak was born in Zabrze, Poland, and received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She is the author of the novel The Ballad of Barbabas Pierkiel, hailed as "a wickedly good debut" by the Los Angeles Times. Also a filmmaker, she has written, directed, and/or produced several motion pictures, including Redland, which was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Zyzak has been honored as an outstanding cultural figure in the Polish community abroad by the Teraz Polska, a cultural foundation. She is a UK resident.