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Goldenseal with author Maria Hummel
February 5 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm EST
The Library is excited to partner with the Northshire Bookstore to host author Maria Hummel on Feb. 5th as she presents her new book Goldenseal! “A Gentleman in Moscow meets My Brilliant Friend in this novel of two estranged friends who reunite to confront each other and the devastating betrayal that tore them apart.”
MARIA HUMMEL is a novelist and poet. Her novel, Still Lives, was a Reese’s Book Club
pick, a Book of the Month Club pick, and a BBC Culture Best Book of 2018 and has
been optioned for television and translated into multiple languages. She is also the
author of Lesson in Red; Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year; and
House and Fire, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. She has worked and
taught at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Stanford University; and the
University of Vermont. She lives in Vermont with her husband and sons.
Books will be available for purchase the day of the event thanks to Northshire Bookstore. More information here.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR GOLDENSEAL
A Zibby Mag Most Anticipated Title of the Year
“In this powerful saga of a family’s immigration and reinvention, Hummel explores themes of love, betrayal,
and reconciliation. . . Hummel skillfully evokes the Cranes’ gilded world of hotels and Hollywood, and deeply
explores the women’s fraught friendship from both points of view. Readers will be rapt.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Ranging from pre–World War II Europe to the glamorous era of postwar Hollywood with stops in New
York City and a girl’s camp set in the northern woods, Hummel’s dissection of what went wrong between
Lacey and Edith borrows from both stagecraft and fairy tale in its analysis. Hummel delivers a lifetime of
pathos and revelation in the course of one night.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Goldenseal is the rare novel whose style perfectly evokes an earlier era while its meaning feels wholly
contemporary. Like the characters within it, we realize how hard it is to understand our lives without the
wider view that only comes with time. Sweeping yet intimate, and with characters who feel as alive as our
closest friends, Goldenseal is a marvel.”
—Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas
“I devoured Goldenseal, enchanted by the satin prose and dialogue as smooth as cognac. I loved everything
about this story of exquisite tenderness, passionate friendship and betrayal, the electric rendezvous of past
and future. The backdrop is an L.A. hotel, haunted by a bygone elegance; but it’s the voices of Edith and
Lacey that truly astonish. They’re still ringing in my ears, clear as a hotel fountain.”
—Miciah Bay Gault, author of Goodnight Stranger
“Goldenseal is a savagely beautiful novel about the dangers and damages of passionate lifelong female
friendship, intertwined with a brilliantly wrought elegy for the twentieth century. Hummel is a powerful writer.
This book is extraordinary.”
—Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of The Great Man
and Welcome Home, Stranger
“For anyone who has ever had—and lost—that rarest of gifts: a true friend. A deft, exquisite novel, one that
will stay in your heart like a memory, as if it were one of your very own.”
—Barbara Bourland, author of The Force of Such Beauty