In The Gilder (amazon.com), a globe-tripping mother-daughter drama set partially in Florence, Italy, a woman struggles to tell her daughter the truth about her father, a man she met while running with a Bohemian crowd as a student in Tuscany. Kay's debut novel borrows exquisite details from her own life—she trained as a gilder, a decorative artist, for five years in the city that birthed the Renaissance.