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Also by Myla Goldberg:

Feast Your Eyes, February 2020
Trade Size / e-Book (reprint)
Feast Your Eyes, April 2019
Hardcover / e-Book
The False Friend, October 2010
Hardcover
Wickett's Remedy, September 2005
Hardcover
Bee Season, May 2001
Trade Size (reprint)

WICKETT'S REMEDY
By: Myla Goldberg

With dazzling dexterity, Goldberg has fashioned a novel that beautifully combines the intimate and the epic. Wickett?s Remedy announces her arrival as a major novelist.

Doubleday
September 2005
Featuring: Lydia Wickett
336 pages
ISBN: 0385513240
Hardcover
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Historical

In a multidimensional, intricately wrought narrative, Myla Goldberg leads us back to Boston in the early part of the twentieth century and into two completely captivating worlds. One is that of Lydia, an Irish American shopgirl with bigger aspirations than your average young woman from South Boston. She seems to be well on her way to the life she has dreamed of when she marries Henry Wickett, a shy medical student and the scion of a Boston Brahmin family. However, soon after their wedding, Henry abruptly quits medical school to create a mail-order patent medicine called Wickett’s Remedy, and just as Lydia begins to adjust to her husband’s new vocation, the infamous Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 begins its deadly sweep across the world, irrevocably changing their lives.

In a world turned almost unrecognizable by swift and sudden tragedy, Lydia finds herself working as a nurse in an experimental ward dedicated to understanding the raging epidemic—through the use of human subjects.

Meanwhile, a parallel narrative explores the world of QD Soda, the illegitimate offspring of Wickett’s Remedy, stolen away by Henry Wickett’s one-time business partner Quentin Driscoll, who goes about transforming it into a soft drink empire.

Throughout the novel we hear from a chorus of other voices who offer a running commentary from the book’s margins, playing off the ongoing narrative and cleverly illuminating the slippery interplay of perception and memory. Based on years of research and evoking actual events, Wickett’s Remedy perfectly captures the texture of the times and brings a colorful cast of characters vividly to life—none more so than Lydia, a heroine as winning and appealing as Eliza, the beloved spelling champion of Bee Season.

Media Buzz

All Things Considered - September 28, 2005