Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's haunting and unforgettable new novel evokes a stunning psychological landscape. The lives of the twin sisters who inhabit it - one celebrated, the other unknown - have been shaped by mutual disdain, need, resentment, love, and enmity. The novel opens more than two decades after the disappearance - at age twenty-six, at the pinnacle of success and fame as a painter - of Florence Meek. Her lasting importance as an artist seems assured.

But her personal life, like her fate, remains a mystery. It appears that the woman the world thought it knew carved her identity from half-truths and lies, the most startling of which was her claim to be an orphan. Yet no one has mourned her more than her twin, Doris Meek ("Doris, shadow of Florence").

And Doris's grief is twofold: "Not only was my sister gone, but it was clear to me that she had wanted to annihilate me, to murder me" - a discovery that has made any search for her missing twin psychologically impossible.

Until now. Driven by disturbing new information, Doris is impelled at last to look for answers to questions that have tormented her for years, but which she could not previously bring herself to face. Is Florence dead? Murdered? Doris embarks on a quest through the past for clues to the meaning of the most important relationship of her life: the bewildering, complex, often obsessional nature of her attachment to her sister.

As the novel moves back and forth through time - and from New York to London to Provence to Vermont - and as Doris moves between the startling events of the present and the still-puzzling world of her memories, she struggles to make sense of her own life and of her sister's life. As she does so, the intricate mystery of her twinship - and of identity itself - is gradually and brilliantly illumined.