New York Mosaic The Novels of Isabel Bolton: Do I Wake or Sleep, The Christmas Tree, Many Mansions

Literary reputations come and go, often with little reason or justice, so it is always a joy when a great "lost" author is rediscovered. Isabel Bolton (the pen name of Mary Britton Miller) wrote and published three critically acclaimed novels in the late 1940s: Do I Wake or Sleep, The Christmas Tree, and Many Mansions. Diana Trilling called her "the most important new novelist to appear in years," and Edmund Wilson compared her to Virginia Woolf. Today she is almost unknown. New York Mosaic collects all three novels and brings Bolton's beautiful and incisive prose to a whole new audience. The Christmas Tree is of particular interest because of the honest and empathetic way that it deals with a gay man who, with his lover, appears at a family Christmas dinner that has tragic results.