Light and Ash: A Novel of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

In the chaos of the infamous 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a woman flees a husband who is desperate to find her.

Sara Gilardi, the spoiled daughter of a wealthy winemaker, paints, draws, sings some opera, but has yet to find her artistic calling. Her husband Lorenzo, an Italian immigrant and shopkeeper, wishes she’d just cook him dinner and tidy the house. To help save their failing marriage, Lorenzo splurges on tickets to see the tenor Enrico Caruso in San Francisco, south of their home in Healdsburg. After the opera, an argument between the couple turns violent and Sara goes to Caruso in his hotel room. She’s with him in bed when the earthquake strikes the next morning. 

After Sara is thrown out by Caruso’s valet, she decides to leave her marriage and flees the burning heart of the city with strangers. Lorenzo, determined not to return home without his wife, embarks on a desperate search through the fires and rubble.  What transpires are journeys that will forever change each of their lives.  

Full of rich detail and vivid characters, Light and Ash bursts into flame, illuminating one of the worst disasters in American history.

Laurie Ann Doyle is winner of the Alligator Juniper National Fiction Award and a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize. The New York Times bestselling author Edan Lepucki praised her first book, World Gone Missing: Stories, for its “rich portrayals of people seeking connection, hope, and renewal, even when there is none to be found.” Laurie’s stories and essays have appeared in McSweeny’s, Alta Journal, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, The Los Angeles Review, among many other publications. Born and raised in California, she is the granddaughter of Italian and Italian-Swiss immigrants and lives in the Bay Area with her husband and son.