The narrator of THE WOMAN IN GREEN repeatedly insults his readers of 2050 and wishes he were instead addressing readers of 2025, when somewhat fewer were boneheads. Born under a curse at the exact moment of the 9/11 attacks, he looks back on two remarkable utopian experiments—one religious, the other secular—in early 19th-century New Harmony, Indiana. He then looks ahead to his grandfather Sam Coverdale’s visionary effort in the millennial year 2000 to create a new “Boatload of Knowledge” on the banks of the Wabash. His cast of characters bears an unsettling resemblance to Mary Shelley’s circle of Frankenstein intimates. What could go wrong? From a macabre scroll found under a labyrinth to a dramatic fiasco on the world stage to a heady balloon ride to freedom, these characters plus one prescient turtle hang on together as friends and lovers, narrowly averting suicide within the ranks. Along the way, a Byronic character merrily cites strong evidence, hitherto overlooked, that Shakespeare himself was a suicide. Against the odds, they emerge with lasting romantic bonds and a vision that the enigmatic Woman in Green will someday prosper on Planet Earth.

LARRY LOCKRIDGE is a writer living in New York City. Professor Emeritus of English, New York University, and a Guggenheim Fellow, he is best known for the award-winning biography of his father, Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of Raintree County. The Woman in Green is the last of four standalone yet interrelated, novels, The Enigma Quartet, to be published by Iguana Books. It was launched January 5th, 2023, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1948 publication of Raintree County, to which it is indirectly an homage.

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Marcia Scanlong, painter, sculptor and poet, has studios in Soho and Upstate New York. She has been represented by John Stoller, Gettler-Paul, Maxwell Davidson, and Central Booking. Her artwork is in personal, corporate, library, and museum collections here and abroad. A solo exhibition of paintings based on the Greek alphabet and Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a reading from her Poems, Mythological were held at The House of Arts & Letters, Larnaca, Cyprus.

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