Richard Mason (1)

Harvard Book Store is excited to welcome RICHARD MASON for a reading from his new novel Natural Elements. The setting is London. The time is the present. Mother and daughter are choosing an assisted-living facility and have come to The Albany, a late-nineteenth-century Victorian mansion, the flagship ... (more)property of the TranquilAge™ chain of nursing homes. The mother, Joan—eighty years old, a gifted amateur pianist denied the pleasures of performance by arthritic hands—dreads the prospect of leaving her apartment, but her daughter has decided that she can no longer live on her own. The daughter, Eloise—forty-eight, a hedge fund manager, two decades in commodities—long ago rejected the possibilities of motherhood and has lived enviably free of responsibility. TThe setting is London. The time is the present. While mother and daughter are on the trip-of-a-lifetime to the South African capital of the old Orange Free State, the city of Joan’s girlhood, Eloise gets a frantic phone call. The price of osmium is in free fall; the fund is off-loading. . . Fighting panic with a coherent strategy, Eloise puts in motion a bold gamble that risks all—her future, the fund, her mother’s well-being.