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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt

GOLDENSEAL

Maria Hummel

One night in an old luxury West Coast hotel, two women meet for the first time in four decades to find out the truth about the events that broke their once-close friendship.

In an old luxury hotel in a West Coast metropolis, Lacey Crane waits to meet Edith Holle, a friend who abandoned her abruptly forty-four years ago and dropped out of contact. Edith was once like a sister to Lacey, a cabin-mate at summer camp who became her best friend. The grand hotel was briefly their home together in the 1930s. Now an old woman, Lacey lives there permanently, and she orders up a lavish meal for her and Edith, who must be arriving to finally have it all out: the secrets, the wounds, the aftermath. Lacey is prepared with a few secrets of her own. GOLDENSEAL is inspired by Sándor Márai's classic, EMBERS, a novel set on a night in 1900 in which two old men, servants of the Empire, meet at a castle in the Carpathians to dissect their young devotion and the act that led to their long estrangement. GOLDENSEAL remakes the year to 1990, the abiding question to female friendship, and the castle to a fictionalized version of Los Angeles's famous Biltmore Hotel. A dramatic, evocative read, GOLDENSEAL reveals how two girls' dreams dissolve and evolve when faced with adult desire, love, pride, and fidelity, and the changing freedoms for American women in the 20th Century. MARIA HUMMEL is a novelist and poet. Her novel, Still Lives, was a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club pick, Book of the Month Club pick, and 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 Poetry 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.

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Book Published 2024-01-09 by Counterpoint Press

Comments

An inventive, immersive book recounting the particular past, old hurts and late healing of two singular characters. Read more...

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. Read more...

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.

Radiant... Goldenseal provides plenty of golden moments, an elixir for these times. Read more...

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.

Goldenseal is a novel about agency and friendship whose questions reverberate far beyond its two protagonists and their particular time and place. Haunting and tragic, it nevertheless lands on a hopeful note. Read more...

A meditation on female friendship, loneliness, and how to move on after betrayal, Goldenseal is both melancholy and escapist.

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.

Ranging from preWorld 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. Read more...

In this taut, tense, and layered novel, Hummel deftly examines the lives of two flawed women against the backdrop of the upheavals of the twentieth century. Read more...

Maria Hummel probes the complexities of female friendship with a deeply immersive writing style, showcasing her poetic chops and skill in crafting nuance. In this entrancing novel - her fifth - the author weaves a complex tapestry of nostalgia, regret, betrayal, and love against the backdrop of Los Angeles in fading splendor.

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.

Suffused with the atmosphere of the past, this exquisitely evocative tale pays tribute to the glamour of old Hollywood. But Goldenseal is no mere nostalgia fest. With wit and acumen, Hummel explores how our divergent interpretations of events can color our memories, locking us in spirals of alienation.... Goldenseal is a thought-provoking read that makes us question the stories we build from our own memories.