The Charterhouse of Padma (1605)

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Two women, living in America's heartland, unearth shocking secrets about the men they love and question the lives they chose. P is on deadline. She should be translating. Instead, she's writing obsessively about her favorite color: chartreuse. A literary translator in Arkansas (of all places), she's married to Mac, a professional feminist too slick for his own good. As the COVID lockdown commences, P discovers a secret about her husband, one that upends her understanding of her life's trajectory. In the widening gulf between who she is and who she thought she might be, she imagines a double, someone very like her, but less lonely, more independent, more angry, more maternal, more fun... Now we meet another "P": a novelist. She's married to a successful poet and translator called Mat. It's a second marriage—her first fell apart when she came upon a secret concealed by her then-husband. This P is exhausted and enraged: by racial