About this item
A haunting literary drama, with a ripped-from-the headlines urgency reminiscent of Defending Jacob and Sue Miller's While I Was Gone, Golden State asks hard questions about the limits of loyalty and the bounds of family ties.Growing up in the 1960s in one of California's most prominent political families, Natalie Askedahl worshipped her big brother, Bobby, a sensitive math prodigy who served as her protector and confidante. But after Bobby left home at sixteen on a Princeton scholarship, something changed between them. Now that Natalie is happily married, with a career and two young daughters, her only real regret is losing Bobby. Then, a bomb explodes in the middle of her seemingly ideal life. Her oldest daughter is on the Stanford campus when one person is killed and another maimed. Other bombings follow across California. Frightened for her family, Natalie grows obsessed with the case until she makes an unthinkable discovery: the bomber's manifesto reads alarmingly like the last letter she has from Bobby. Unsure of whom to sacrifice and whom to protect, Natalie is confronted with a terrible choice that will send her down a rabbit hole of confusion, lies, and betrayals. As her life splits irrevocably into before and after, she begins to learn that some of the most dangerous things in the world are the stories we tell ourselves.
About the Author
Stephanie Kegan was born in North Dakota and raised in the much warmer Southern California. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in history, she worked at mostly numbing jobs until she could support herself as a writer. Her new novel Golden State??coming from Simon & Schuster in 2015??explores how fragile the foundation of an ordinary life can be. She is the author of a previous novel, The Baby, many magazine articles and series of guidebooks published by Chronicle Books. Stephanie lives in Los Angeles with her family.
