Lucia's Masks follows the journey of six strangers who meet by chance after fleeing the psychic defilement of a barbaric totalitarian state and travel North to where they can create a free and humane society. The novel interweaves their personal histories with their experience and encounters as they journey together. The principal voice belongs to Lucia; the group's forager, an aspiring sculptress, who once cleaned office buildings for a living. Sickened by the moral decay and the dominant culture's obsession with pornography, she has chosen to seek spiritual renewal and has chosen to remain a virgin. When she leaves the city, she takes with her a ball of clay and a copy of the death mask of John Keats. Her companions in flight from the city are the Outpacer, a former extreme hedonist and philanderer, who now hides his face and identity behind a monk's cowl; Bird Girl, a young woman constantly searching for books from the past because the libraries have been razed and all...

This novel interweaves Renaissance artist Piero di Cosimo's fifteenth-century viewpoint with the twenty-first-century reality of two young Canadian students: Agnes Vane, an art history major fascinated by di Cosimo's multi-layered imagery, and Peter (Pinto) Dervaig, a student of philosophy passionate about preventing cruelty to animals. Both Agnes and Pinto were marginalized in their adolescence because of their unusual appearance. Agnes has slightly simian features. Pinto is a huge man with a multihued skin pigmentation. When Agnes, as a lonely and alienated child, discovers di Cosimo's empathetic paintings of animals and human-animal hybrids, she feels she is looked upon gently for the first time in her life. That moment influences her decision to become an animal rights activist, a commitment that ultimately brings her both anguish and insight. Her story is echoed by chapters from di Cosimo's perspective as he pits his solitary vision, of a golden age when animals did indeed...

In the legend-steeped Borders region of Scotland, a writer discovers the hidden past of the man she loves and the truth of her mother’s teachings.