by Maria Hummel
A novel is a dream wishing its way toward completion without its first readers. Rita Mae Reese, Sara Houghteling, Elizabeth Fenton, Sarah Frisch, Miciah Bay Gault, Liz Powell, Angie Palm, and Mirra Schwartz, thank you for reading and helping me shape my early drafts. Thank you, Gail Hochman, my wise and ever-supportive agent, for asking all the right questions next.
To Dan Smetanka, my editor, thank you for always seeing the book inside the book, and for being its brilliant, generous, exacting champion.
To the Counterpoint-Catapult family—which is just large enough and dear enough to make me panic that I am forgetting someone—in my mind, you all won the Halloween contest. Thank you, Andy Hunter, for your pioneering energy and warm leadership; Megan Fishmann and Lena Moses-Schmitt, for your blazing publicity skills; Nicole Caputo, for your artistry; Dan López, for your many talents in the L.A. office; Rachel Fershleiser, in marketing; Wah-Ming Chang and Jordan Koluch in production; Janet Renard, for your eye; Katie Boland and Miyako Singer for the many details you arrange.
Thank you, Jaya Miceli, for your breathtaking covers. They teach me.
A huge thanks goes to Reese Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine for the deep impact you are making for women authors, as well as the passionate readers I’ve met through your book club. Thank you, Marianne Merola at Brandt & Hochman for bringing my books to audiences around the world. My gratitude also goes to my savvy TV/film agent, Mary Pender at UTA, and Temple Hill and NBC/Universal, especially Julie Waters, Adam Fishbach, and Jess Goldberg, for working to take this project to the screen.
To the University of Vermont, thank you for the grant to support this book, and for my inspiring English department colleagues and students. Dan Fogel, Major Jackson, Didi Jackson, Val Rohy, Huck Gutman, Greg Bottoms, Sarah Turner, Tony Magistrale, Chris Vaccaro, Philip Baruth, Holly Painter, David Huddle, Chloe Knapp, Margaret Edwards, and Angela Patten deserve special thanks.
Finally, thank you to my mother for your strength, generosity, and integrity—a daughter could not have a more powerful role model. Thank you to my brothers for your abiding support and for occasionally running the vacuum cleaner during my overbearing childhood performances. To everyone in the Parmelee clan and to my in-laws, you’ve taught me that caring for people means raising one another up, and I’m grateful.
To Bowie and Bruce, you are the light I wake for every morning. To Kyle, I don’t know where to begin except that test in Fred Chappell’s Modern Poetry class, where you answered the question wrong but you got a point for humor anyway. I loved you then, I love you now, and I’m still learning from you. Thank you for always believing in this work.
© Karen Pike
MARIA HUMMEL is a novelist and poet. Her most recent novel, Still Lives, was a Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine pick, Book of the Month 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 the novel Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year, and House and Fire, winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize for Poetry. 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.
Lesson in Red
Copyright © 2021 by Maria Hummel
First hardcover edition: 2021
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hummel, Maria, author.
Title: Lesson in red : a novel / Maria Hummel.
Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020029463 | ISBN 9781640094314 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781640094321 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.U46 L47 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029463
Jacket design by Jaya Miceli
Book design by Jordan Koluch
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