Jessica Zack April 3, 2021
Jasmin Darznik, author of the historical novel “The Bohemians,” stands in front of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle
As a teenager living in Marin County in the early 1990s, Jasmin Darznik loved driving into San Francisco to wander North Beach. Like so many aspiring writers before her, she’d spend hours in City Lights bookstore and nurse espressos on Columbus Avenue, enamored with the neighborhood’s storied artistic past.
“It was my own bohemia,” Darznik writes in the author’s note to her new historical novel, “The Bohemians,” out Tuesday, April 6. It’s a captivating coming-of-age story of Dorothea Lange before she was a world-famous photographer, and a portrait of complicated post-World War I San Francisco.