![A Piece of the World, by Christina Baker Kline.](/web/20170309022838im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/f/o/e/i/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gufotn.png/1487555517497.jpg)
A Piece of the World
Christina Baker Kline
The Borough Press, $29.99
Most readers will be familiar with the beautiful and unsettling Andrew Wyeth painting called Christina's World, in which a ghostly-looking farmhouse sits on the distant horizon in a sea of yellow-green grass, while in the foreground a dark-haired woman in a pale pink dress seems almost to be crawling through the grass towards the house. Christina Baker Kline has taken this powerfully creepy icon of American art and fleshed out the real-life story behind it, using the historical figures of Wyeth and his model Christina Olson as two of her characters and following their story so closely as to be barely fiction at all. Kline's portrait of her main character is moving in an unsentimental way as she evokes the New England landscape, the torment of crippling disease, and the piece of history embodied in Olson's story.