The year is 1906, the setting a Paris atelier. A new literature is born amidst brazen canvases that pack the walls of a high-ceilinged room. Artists, students, writers, and musicians come to talk and listen and look. They come to see paintings by an unknown Picasso, and by Matisse, and by Cézanne, artwork different from anything they find elsewhere. And they come to meet the compelling, eccentric sister-brother team at the center of it all: Gertrude and Leo Stein. In a fascinating dual biography of these two American expatriates, Brenda Wineapple tells the story of a powerful, poignant relationship rooted in love, longing, and smoldering rivalry, a relationship so profound that when it ruptured in 1914, sister and brother never spoke to each other again.