The Danish Girl

In a Nyhavn painting studio in the 1920s, landscape artist Einar Wegener puts on his wife Gerda's stockings to model for a portrait and does not want to take them off. Inspired by the true story of Lili Elbe — one of the first people to undergo gender confirmation surgery — Ebershoff's novel tracks a marriage dissolving and reforming as Copenhagen's art world watches. The city here is golden-hour canals and gallery openings, a place cultured enough to look but not yet ready to understand.