Carol Cassella - Gemini - Saturday, Nov. 1, 7pm

Carol Cassella, M.D. is a practicing physician and national bestselling author of two novels, Oxygen (2008) and Healer (2010), published by Simon & Schuster and translated into multiple foreign languages. Both novels were Indie Next Picks and finalists for the Washington State Book Award in fiction.

In her most recent book, Gemini (2014), an unidentified woman is hit by a car and abandoned along a rural highway in western Washington. She is life-flighted to a Seattle trauma center, where she’s admitted to the intensive care unit overseen by Dr. Charlotte Reese, who battles to keep her “Jane Doe” patient alive while a police investigation tries to discover who is responsible for this hit and run—a charge that could turn into murder if the injured woman dies. Charlotte also senses a more covert battle brewing with the hospital’s legal department when they assign a professional guardian to stand in lieu of Jane’s unknown family and make critical decisions about her care. In frustration, Charlotte begin's her own efforts to find Jane’s family, veering across the professional boundary between physician and patient and uncovering what will be, for Charlotte, life-altering truths.

In addition to Carol Cassella's work in medicine and literature, she is a founding member of Seattle7Writers, a non-profit supporting literacy and reading in the Pacific Northwest. She lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington with her husband and two sets of twins.