Sleeping Fires: a Novel

The story opens in a bustling, half‑tamed San Francisco of the early Sixties, where sand‑strewn avenues and wooden sidewalks give way to stately homes tucked behind high‑walled gardens of Castilian roses. Mrs. Hunt McLane, the self‑appointed queen of her social circle, has just moved to a grand yet recently bankrupt mansion on Rincon Hill and is throwing an elaborate house‑warming that gathers the city’s most influential ladies. Their evenings unfold amid the clatter of carriage wheels, the scent of wilted fountains, and whispered rumors that swirl through the fragrant corridors.

Into this tightly knit world strides Dr. Howard Talbot, a charismatic, forty‑year‑old physician whose charm has made him a darling of San Francisco’s elite. The community is shaken when news arrives that he has married a Boston woman he barely knows, a decision that upends the unwritten rule that the city’s social aristocracy belongs to the South. As the women of the circle convene to dissect the scandal, the novel teases the simmering tensions between tradition and change, setting the stage for the personal and societal conflicts that will follow.