Fair Warning - Couverture souple

"Perhaps my fate was sealed when I sold my three-year-old sister..."And so began Amy Dickerson's lifelong fascination with the art and exhilaration of the sale. Ambitious, winsome, and ceaselessly charismatic, Amy is the star employee of Nichols and Gray, an auction house catering to the shopping pheromones of the rich and powerful. She has turned the pitch into her creative art, using the abundant talents of a sophisticated woman: wit, charm, knowledge, and above all an outstanding ability to read people and intuit their deepest desires. Her customers are intoxicated with love for the objects that define them and thrilled by the act of making them their own. And sometimes, such as when a mysterious man locks eyes with her as she gives "fair warning" before sounding the auction gavel, that object is Amy herself. After years of fighting a smothering mother, a suburbanite sister whom Amy struggles to respect, a late father who never forgave Amy for abandoning the family business, and the ghosts of doomed relationships, Amy thinks she has finally found love in the form of Alain Bouchard, a suave and sophisticated French business mogul who aims to be Amy's new boss. It all seems perfect until unsettling signs begin to appear. Is Alain so different from Amy's alienated clients - connoisseurs who lose touch with the very things they pursue? From one of the most versatile and highly acclaimed writers of fiction, Fair Warning is a sweeping, fast-moving and alluringly intimate meditation on the possibility of love in a world where everyone must own or be owned.

Robert Olen Butler is the author of ten novels and two collections of stories. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and a National Magazine Award in 2001 (both for fiction), he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and an NEA grant, as well as the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.