Elizabeth Ames

Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome debut author ELIZABETH AMES for a discussion of her new novel, The Other's Gold.

About The Other's Gold

Assigned to the same suite during their freshman year at Quincy-Hawthorn College, Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret quickly become inseparable. The leafy green campus they move through together, the idyllic window seat they share in their suite, and the passion and ferocity that school and independence awakens in them ignites an all-encompassing love with one another. But they soon find their bonds—forged in joy, and fused by fear—must weather threats that originate from beyond the dark forests of their childhoods, and come at them from institutions, from one another, and ultimately, from within themselves. 

The Other's Gold follows the four friends as each makes a terrible mistake, moving from their wild college days to their more feral days as new parents. With one part devoted to each mistake—the Accident, the Accusation, the Kiss, and the Bite—this complex yet compulsively readable debut interrogates the way that growing up forces our friendships to evolve as the women discover what they and their loved ones are capable of, and capable of forgiving. A joyful, big-hearted book that perfectly evokes the bittersweet experience of falling in love with friendship, the experiences of Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret are at once achingly familiar and yet shine with a brilliance and depth all their own.

Praise for The Other's Gold

“A sharply-drawn portrait of a lifelong friendship, The Other’s Gold follows four young women bearing past traumas and navigating unimagined futures. With an uncanny eye for detail, Elizabeth Ames charts the complex, ever-shifting topography of this ‘chosen family’—and illuminates the ways our closest friends sustain us over the course of our lives.” —Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere

“Reading Elizabeth Ames’s The Other’s Gold is like sinking into a lucid dream, wonderful and unsettling in turns, surreally beautiful throughout. . . . [We] feel as if we are growing into adulthood, into womanhood, with her characters. We feel every bruise, every elation, in part because Ames writes in language that is feverish and refined, with equal parts tenderness and ruthlessness. That her writing can do all this at once is incredible. Read her, and you will be richer for it.” —Jesmyn Ward, New York Times bestselling author of Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones

“One of the most immersive, unsettling books I've read in a long, long time. For hours after I finished it, the book felt realer to me than my own life did. There is something almost painful about how close we get to these characters: Ames observes them with a kind of ardent incision that at times feels like watching someone perform open-heart surgery, and at other times feels like having open-heart surgery performed on you. I was devastated by it. I loved it.”
—Kristen Roupenian, bestselling author of You Know You Want This