Costalegre

"Delightful ... In Lara, Maum has given a little-considered daughter a more hopeful future." Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review

“Maum’s slender, intelligent Costalegre is about many things: art as spectacle and art as discipline; life as joke and life as tragedy; the role of unreason in paintings and politics. But most of all, it’s about the youthful desire to be, in Lara’s words, contemplated and considered ― to be, in short, loved." The Boston Globe

A Best Book of Summer at AM New York, Moda Operandi, GOOP, Publishers Weekly, TIME, Southern Living, and Thrillist.

It is 1937, and Europe is on the brink of war. Hitler is circulating a most-wanted list of “cultural degenerates”― artists, writers, and thinkers whose work is deemed antithetical to the new regime. To prevent the destruction of her favorite art (and artists), the impetuous American heiress and modern art collector Leonora Calaway begins chartering boats and planes for an elite group of surrealists to Costalegre, a mysterious resort in the Mexican jungle.

The story of what happens to these artists when they reach their destination is told from the point of view of Lara, Leonora’s neglected fifteen-year-old daughter. Forced from a young age to live with her mother’s eccentric whims, tortured lovers, and entourage of gold-diggers, Lara suffers from emotional, educational, and geographical instability that a Mexican sojourn with surrealists isn’t going to help. But when she meets the outcast Dadaist sculptor Jack Klinger, Lara thinks she might have found the understanding she so badly craves.

Heartbreaking and strange, Costalegre is inspired by the real-life relationship between the heiress Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen. Courtney Maum triumphs with this wildly imaginative and curiously touching story of a privileged teenager who has everything a girl could wish for ― except a mother who loves her back.

"Mesmerizing. A book for anyone who's ever loved, and not felt sufficiently loved in return; and for anyone who's had to try to grow up; for, that is, everyone." R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

"This story of a daughter searching for connection all around her has a sharp cutting edge, a world which changes its mood in an instant; bleak as the dregs of a wine-soaked dinner, then bullish as a house of hapless surrealists attempting to boil an egg. Memorable and meaningful, Maum's work remains with me as a reminder of love in the agony of teenage years and art in the terror of war." Amelia Gray, author of ISADORA

"A brilliantly arch and haunting novel of privilege and deprivation." Booklist

"A lush chronicle of wealth, art, adventure, loneliness, love, and folly told by a narrator you won't be able to forget." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

Courtney Maum is the author of the novels Touch and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You. Her writing has been widely published in outlets such as the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; BuzzFeed; and Electric Literature. She lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut, where she runs the collaborative learning retreat, The Cabins.