When Doll, a British painter just out of art school at the Slade, 
arrives in New Mexico in 1924, she is certain only of her faith in the 
man who invited her: social philosopher Abe Bronstone, who has left
Britain to found a model society in Taos. Doll has renounced her own aristocratic roots to join the high desert household of Abe and his wife Vera (a scandalous German divorcée). Doll’s narration of events moves backward to her childhood in Victorian London, and
forward to her solitary life in 1963 Taos—solitary until she meets the
much younger Akbar ("He doesn't know how much younger and I don't plan
to tell him"). As the community around Abe--which loosely incorporates
East Coast heiress Janie; her Native American husband, Junior; local
Indians from the reservation; and a war-traumatized Chicago poet and
his wife—unravels, Doll's affair with Akbar, the most fulfilling of
her life, intensifies, but it puts her in small-town conflict with
Akbar's mother, protective of her sweetly ne'er-do-well son.

Inspired by events in the life of the British painter Dorothy Brett, who ventured
to Taos in the years after World War I, A Richer Dust finds in Doll's
life the convulsive shift from the Victorian to the Modern, as
aesthetics and sexuality found explosive new forms. It is the story of
a woman who remains open to life despite discouragement and
disappointments, and whose self-discovery--of her art, her body, and
her mind--is as unceasing as it is unaffected. The Taos landscape,
through Doll's eyes (and through the rest of her keen senses, except
for her damaged hearing), is vivid and breathtaking, and serves as a
magnificent canvas for sketching the arc of her life.