The place is Detroit, the year is 1943. A pretty young woman climbs aboard a streetcar in the crowded wartime city. She is heading home, where another war - a domestic war - is about to erupt.

Our heroine, Bianca Paradiso (Bea to her friends and family), is eighteen and an ambitious art student. She is determined to observe everything, and there is much to see in a thriving, sleepless city where automobile production has been halted in favor of fighter planes and tanks, and where wounded soldiers have begun to appear with disturbing frequency.

The glorious pursuit of art and the harrowing pursuit of military victory eventually merge when Bea is asked to draw portraits of wounded soldiers in a local hospital. Suddenly, bewilderingly, she must deal with lives maimed at their outset, and with headlong romantic yearnings that demand more of her than she feels prepared to give.

In this, his sixth novel, Brad Leithauser has realized a double feat of imagination: a loving historical portrait of a now-vanished Detroit in its heyday, and a keen and affectionate rendering of the artist as a young woman. Rich, humorous, engrossing, The Art Student's War is Leithauser's finest novel yet.