Author, Margaret Panofsky

Margaret Panofsky feels passionately about her debut novel, The Last Shade Tree. The opening chapters share her roots in Northern California where she grew up surrounded by live oak trees and golden wild-oat grass—present-day Silicon Valley. She abandoned what was left of that idyllic beauty to live in New York City. She is a retired musician whose instrument is the viola da gamba. While teaching at New York University, she founded and directed the Teares of the Muses, a consort of viols. After years of playing Renaissance and Baroque music, she believes her novel has a definite musical lilt.

 A few summers ago Margaret Panofsky discovered more roots—the graves of her ancestors in the Jewish cemetery in Tarnowskie Góry, Poland. As her book characters search for self-knowledge, she realizes that authors, too, never end that quest. 

Margaret’s mind runs naturally to myth and fantasy. Telling a story about extraordinary people intensely bound together on a journey to unknown places, her episodes feel like edgy folktales interlaced with new myths that impart a touch of magic realism. She loves to balance deadly serious and darkly comic writing even as her characters experience the worst humanity has to offer.

Letting her characters speak for her, Margaret voices her dismay that people seem incapable of learning from past atrocities. But she didn’t want to preach, so she imagined a scenario that would be fun, romantic, and sometimes tragic—angry, too. It’s an intimate tale enclosed in an epic adventure.

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An Amazon reader writes, “The tone shifts from romantic to darkly funny to poignant to mythological/spiritual, and the descriptive language is movingly poetic. The underlying message is about humanity: our equal power to nurture and to destroy ourselves, the people around us, and our planet.”