Astor Place Vintage

Amanda Rosenbloom, proprietor of Astor Place Vintage, thinks she'son just another call to appraise and possibly purchase clothing from a wealthy, elderly woman. But after discovering a journal sewn into a fur muff, Amanda gets much more than she anticipated. The pages of the journal reveal the life of Olive Westcott, a young woman who had moved to Manhattan in 1907. Olive was set on pursuing a career as a department store buyer in an era when Victorian ideas, limiting a woman's sphere to marriage and motherhood, were only beginning to give way to modern ways of thinking. As Amanda reads the journal, her life begins to unravel until she can no longer ignore this voice from the past. Despite being separated by one hundred years, Amanda finds she's connected to Olive in ways neither could ever have imagined.

About the Author

Stephanie Lehmann was born in foggy San Francisco and didn't take her sweater off until she moved away to college. She can remember deciding to become a writer in a fit of existential angst when she was twelve. After graduating from UC Berkeley and spending a year hanging out, working in a cafe, writing a novel that would now be embarrassing to let anyone read, and getting depressed, Lehmann decided to move to New York so she could do the same thing in a more crowded location. She started dating a guy from Long Island who was in her writing workshop at NYU. They ended up getting married and having two kids. Eventually she published four novels and now Astor Place Vintage is her fifth. Lehmann still lives in New York City, where there is no fog but way too much humidity.