Bywater Books is pleased to announce the acquisition of Paper is White by debut novelist Hilary Zaid. “This is a rich and thought provoking first novel,” said publisher Salem West. “It’s warm, honest, and funny, yet it manages to deliver finespun relationships that each explore the natural progression of love, trust, commitment, and the ultimate quest for happiness.”
When oral historian Ellen Margolis and her girlfriend decide to get married, Ellen realizes that she can’t go through with a wedding until she tells her grandmother. There’s only one problem: her grandmother is dead. As the two young women beat their own early path toward marriage equality, Ellen’s longing to plumb that voluminous silence draws her into a clandestine entanglement with a wily Holocaust survivor–a woman with more to hide than tell–and a secret search for buried history that threatens to disrupt all of Ellen’s plans. If there is to be a wedding Ellen must decide: How much do you need to share to be true to the one you love? Set in ebullient, 1990s Dot-com era San Francisco, Paper is White is a novel about the gravitational pull of the past and the words we must find to make ourselves whole.
“I’m delighted to have Paper is White between the covers with a publishing house dedicated to creating a place in the world for voices outside of the mainstream,” said Zaid. #OwnVoices.
