Young journalist Violet Maris tells a daring lie that launches her on a collision course with the truth about herself. “You just can’t trust a writer,” Violet says. Trust Diane Wald to write a beautifully unsparing, rollickingly funny, tender story about fact and fiction, love and art, set in the creative hub of 1980s Provincetown. A great read you won’t want to put down.

 

—Philip Bennett, former managing editor, The Washington Post

 

Diane Wald's concise narrative and character-driven plot make this novel a joy. With a colorful combination of humor, romance, drama, and intrigue, the pages of The Bayrose Files fly past effortlessly. I finished the book in a single sitting and enjoyed every moment….The dialogue is witty, and all the character interactions feel organic. I love how Wald makes Violet such a dynamic and layered character in a few pages….I highly recommend this book.

—Reviewed by Pikasho Deka for Readers’ Favorite, 5 stars

 

Once I started Diane Wald’s The Bayrose Files I couldn’t put it down. The book is written in first person, so it’s easy to get inside the protagonist, Violet’s, head. She is quirky, and so real that I fell in love with her from the first page. The author writes beautiful, visual prose, the story moves at the perfect pace to lure you in, and you’re sad when it’s over. I loved this novel and I’m sure you will, too.

—Leslie A. Rasmussen, author of After Happily Ever After and The Stories We Cannot Tell

 

The Bayrose Files is a gem of a book, taking us into the creative and complex world of an art colony, seen through the eyes of an impostor. The characters, story, structure, language, setting, and pacing are brilliant. The moral lessons are gentle, human foibles forgivable. I devoured it in a single sitting and remain in awe of Diane Wald's imagination.

—Romalyn Tilghman, author of To the Stars Through Difficulties

 

I gulped down The Bayrose Files in one sitting. What starts as a simple story of deception unspools into a tale of grief, love, and complicated regret. In prose that crackles, Diane Wald crafts a marvelous storyteller in Violet Maris. Violet is sharp, endearing, and deeply human. It was a pleasure to follow her every bad decision. Violet—and Wald—kept me guessing until the last page. 

—Miriam Gershow, author of Closer and Survival Tips: Stories

 

For Violet Maris, the temperature varies in inanimate objects. This is her guide in The Home, a prestigious artist colony in Provincetown where, as a journalist, she poses as a fiction writer in order to write an exposé. Following the relative heat of things, she navigates the death of a dear friend, a love affair with a board member, and her own deceit. Of course, there is a reckoning, but it is not what she expects, in this metaphysical and gripping story where the pages seem to turn by themselves. What will touch her now?

      --William C. Dell, author of Home Alone in the Multiverse and Time’s Hidden Dimension

 

The Bayrose Files explores the tension in a young and highly ambitious writer who will do anything to make her dream come true…. Themes of creativity and self-exploration are cleverly developed…. [T]his deftly written and balanced narrative will engage readers from the beginning to the very last page, thanks to the gorgeous and descriptive prose.

—Reviewed by Romuald Dzemo for The Book Commentary, 5 stars

 

 

 

In The Bayrose Files, Diane Wald’s quirky narrator spins a strange story as oddly poignant as its setting: an artists’ community in early 80’s Provincetown. The moody, seductive atmosphere of this town and that time offers a fitting backdrop for this tale of betrayal and imposture. Violet Maris, named for the sea, tells a story of shifting currents, fogs of betrayal, emotional shipwreck, and ultimate confession. Wald’s story is smart and moving, a search for lost time and a reckoning with ghosts.

 

—Cynthia Huntington, author of The Salt House and Heavenly Bodies

 

 

 

When 26-year-old journalist Violet Maris goes undercover to write an exposé of a budding literary colony in Provincetown, a place with “no restrictions…on what a person could look like, or be, or even pretend to be,” the story she ends up telling is not at all what she expected; it’s her own story of the consequences of pretending to be something and someone she’s not. With sympathy and warmth, vividness and keen humor, Diane Wald chronicles Violet’s painful and belated coming of age, while bringing to life a raucous, randy, dedicated cast of artists and writers. Long after The Bayrose Files ends, you will find Violet living on in your imagination: her ambitions, regrets, losses, and conscience pangs are keenly relatable, as is her journey toward authenticity, accountability, and living up to her heart’s potential.  

 

—Karen Holmberg, author of The Collagist  

 

 

A zippy tale, à la rogue journalism, that hopes to blow the lid off art poseurs and writing colonies, Diane Wald’s The Bayrose Files instead finds a genuine heart on Cape Cod. As anyone who’s ever been to Provincetown knows, there’s a certain slant of light, color, atmosphere. Wald’s novella captures this brilliantly, especially the sharp clarities of Ptown off season: “It was a gorgeous October Cape Cod day: brilliant and blustery and smelling of brine and pine and fallen leaves.” In a loosely veiled send up of the Fine Arts Work Center, Wald––a former fellow––finds the bona fides in the details: weather, seafood, dank bars, western sunsets at Herring Cove. But there’s something more. Episodic, witty, and then unexpectedly moving, it’s a story about a would-be writer who’s also strangely a thermopath. Yes, thermopath, a ‘she who senses when things get hot.’ Wald’s avatar Violet Maris knows things when she touches them. And The Bayrose Files captures touching moments: endings, beginnings, love, loss, shame––all the vicissitudes that beset any of us trying to be authentic. Read The Bayrose Files and smell the brine. 

––Matthew Cooperman, author of Wonder About The 

 

 

In spare and evocative prose, The Bayrose Files chronicles the coming-of-age of a misguided young journalist who goes under false pretenses to an artists’ residency in off-season 1980s Provincetown. Diane Wald draws a compelling portrait of a complicated young woman forced to grapple with the cost of her ambition and the inevitability of regret. I thoroughly enjoyed this refreshingly unsentimental novel.

—Karen Dukess, author of The Last Book Party