Meet Kate Manning, Author of Gilded Mountain

ABOUT THE BOOK...

Sylvie recounts the story of leaving her family’s snowbound mountain cabin to work in the local manor house for the Padgetts, owners of the marble mining company that employs her father and dominates the town. Sharp-eyed Sylvie is awed by the luxury around her, fascinated by her employer, the charming “Countess” Inge, and confused by the erratic affections of Jasper, the bookish heir to the family fortune. When she learns that a European King will soon arrive for a hunting party, her fairy-tale ideas of glamour and romance take a dark turn. She realizes the Padgetts’ lofty philosophical talk is at odds with the unfair labor practices that have enriched them. Their servants, the Gradys, formerly enslaved people, have long known this to be true—and are making plans to form a utopian community on the Colorado prairie.

Outside the manor walls, Moonstone is roiling with discontent. A handsome union organizer, working with labor leader Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, is stirring up the quarry workers. The local newspaper editor—a bold woman who takes Sylvie on as an apprentice—is publishing unflattering accounts of the Padgett Company. Threats of violence permeate the air. Sylvie navigates between vastly different worlds and struggles to find her voice amidst conflicting loves and loyalties. When the harsh and dangerous winter brings tragedy, Sylvie must choose between silence and revenge.

Drawn from true stories of Colorado history, GILDED MOUNTAIN grapples with the forces common to both the 1910s and 2020s—wealth and poverty, immigration, and freedom of expression.

In the shadow of the glittering mountains, Manning has given us an irrepressible young heroine and an indelible novel about longing for family, equality, beauty, and joy.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK...

"The gold at the center of Kate Manning’s remarkably panoramic and meticulously researched new novel is one indomitable Sylvie Pelletier—an adventurer, a romantic, a crackerjack observer of worlds and hearts. Gilded Mountain is that rare thing: a historical page-turner that nimbly moves from gritty mining shafts to elegant drawing rooms of an earlier America with all its seething and striving, and where—then, as now—fates are decided by a stroke of luck or unluck, kindness and corruption, and reinvention. --Carol Edgarian, author of Vera

"Kate Manning is a master storyteller. Gilded Mountain is so immersive, so richly imagined, that reading it feels akin to time travel. Manning writes historical sagas like no one else; the dreamers, strivers, and opportunists who populate this tale possess a uniquely American desire to reinvent themselves, whatever it takes. An epic story of love, hope and perseverance."

--#1 New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline

"Here is adventure of the first order, as young Sylvie Pelletier finds herself thrust into a seething union dispute in a marble-quarrying town. There’s violence in the wintry air, but also romance, as two charismatic men vie for Sylvie’s attention. Dread and love entwine, as the forces and people that transformed the 20th century converge on the town, all this rendered by Ms. Manning in prose as clean and sharp as the stone saws on the mountain. Brilliant."

--#1 New York Times bestselling author Erik Larson

"The best historical novels sing because, through them, we feel the reverberations of the past in the present day. Hard work, love, sorrow, revenge, joy — Gilded Mountain hums with all of this and more." --Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes

About Author:

Kate Manning is the critically acclaimed author of My Notorious Life. An Emmy award-winning documentary television producer, she has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Time, Glamour, and The Guardian. O Magazine called My Notorious Life “a daring page-turner,” Real Simple called it an “inspiring, thought-provoking work,” and in the Washington Post, Ron Charles said, the “story [keeps] burning right to the end.”

Now, in Manning’s GILDED MOUNTAIN (Scribner; November 1, 2022), an epic historical novel set in the small marble-mining town of Moonstone, Colorado, she tells the story of Sylvie Pelletier, a naive young woman trying to find her place in a hostile climate and the wider world. The novel is a bildungsroman that turns the Cinderella story inside out and offers an illuminating portrait of the American West seized by robber barons, built by immigrants’ infinite toil.