First published 2019
Anna Wulf sits in her London flat, staring at blank pages. The divorced novelist cannot write. She lives with her young child in the 1950s, watching her creative powers slip away. Fear creeps in that she might lose her mind entirely. Anna turns to four colored notebooks to make sense of her fractured existence. The black notebook holds her struggles as a writer. Red captures her political beliefs. Yellow contains her emotional turmoil. Blue records the mundane details of daily life. Each notebook reflects a different piece of her identity, but the pieces refuse to connect. Anna faces rejection in her work and betrayal in her relationships. She searches for meaning across her personal, political, and professional worlds. Then she discovers a fifth notebook. This golden notebook becomes the key that might unite the scattered fragments of her life into something whole.
Genres: literary-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, adult-fiction
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: London
Period: 1950s
576 pages · Paperback · Fourth Estate
Content warnings: mental-illness