Goldenseal
A Novel
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Vermont Book Awards
Longlisted for the Clark Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
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
Downtown Los Angeles, 1990. Alone in her luxury hotel suite, the reclusive Lacey Crane receives a message: Edith is waiting for her in the lobby. Former best friends, Lacey and Edith haven’t spoken to one another in over four decades.
As young adults meeting at summer camp in Maine, and later making their way in the glitzy spotlight of postwar Hollywood, Edith and Lacey share a deep-rooted bond that once saved them from isolation and despair, providing comfort from the public and private traumas that they had each endured and which a newly optimistic world was eager to forget. Told through a continuous, twisting conversation that unfolds over the course of a single evening, in which each woman tells her story and reveals long-hidden secrets, the narratives of Edith and Lacey burn with atmosphere, mystery, resentment, and regret.
Set against the vivid landscapes of Los Angeles and unfolding with the evanescence of a dream or a memory, Goldenseal peels away the layers of an intimate female friendship to reveal a stirring and haunting story about the search for connection and the lingering echoes of lost love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this powerful saga of a family's immigration and reinvention, Hummel (Motherland) explores themes of love, betrayal, and reconciliation. Lucie Weber, the cherished only daughter of a German-born hotelier and a Jewish mother, becomes Lacey Crane after emigrating with her family as a young girl from Prague to New York City during the Great Depression. At 13, while convalescing at a summer camp in Maine to clear her consumptive cough, she meets Edith, the hardscrabble daughter of a local widower who physically abuses her. They immediately bond and keep in touch between reuniting at the camp each summer through their teen years. When Lacey is in her mid-20s, she accompanies her father to Los Angeles, where he's pursuing a hotel deal, and Edith joins her. There, Lacey marries dashing movie executive Cal, not realizing Cal has fallen for Edith until Edith ends up getting pregnant by him. Forty-four years later, in 1990, Lacey agrees to meet with Edith, though she's still upset over Edith's betrayal. 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.
