In 1903, the artist Gwendolen Mary John travels from London to France with her companion Dorelia. Surviving on their wits and Gwen’s raw talent, the young women walk from Calais to Paris. In the new century, the world is full of promise: it is time for Gwen to step out from the shadow of her overbearing brother Augustus and seek out the great painter and sculptor Auguste Rodin. It is time to be brave and visible, to love and be loved – and time perhaps to become a hero as the stain of anti-Semitism spreads across Europe.
Goldie Goldbloom is the author of The Paperbark Shoe winner of the AWP Novel Award and many other prizes, as well as a collection of short stories, You Lose These. Her work has been selected for the Best Australian Short Stories, and has been published in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Narrative. Hunger Mountain awarded her their Nonfiction prize (2014). She teaches at the University of Chicago and at Northwestern University ever since being named as their Simon Blattner Fellow. She is the recipient of a NEA Fellowship, a Brown Foundation-Dora Maar House Fellowship, a Jerusalem Post Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Fellowship. She is a founding board member of Eshel, an advocacy organization for LGBTQ minorities and a mother of eight.
