Chosen as a BOOK OF THE YEAR in the Sunday Times, Stylist and
Observer 'A multifaceted novel that is funny, verbally inventive
and moving' Sunday Times, Book of the Year 'In Mercury Pictures
Presents by Anthony Marra (John Murray) a young woman escapes from
Italy to Hollywood, leaving her father behind. The story moves
between the real war and the better version Hollywood is busy
creating. Sometimes tragic, often hilarious' Karen Joy Fowler,
Observer, Books of the Year 'Its prose pulses with humour, wit and
affection' Mail on Sunday The epic tale of a brilliant woman who
must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini's Italy to
1940s Los Angeles-a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice
from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of A
Constellation of Vital Phenomena Like many before her, Maria Lagana
has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every
Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria
immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood
transgression leads to her father's arrest. Fifteen years later, on
the eve of America's entry into World War II, Maria is an associate
producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and
professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won't speak to
her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to
Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a
virtuoso Chinese American actor, can't escape the studio's narrow
typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria's only home in exile,
teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Over the coming months, as the
bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes
a nexus of European emigres: modernist poets trying their luck as
B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming
scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing
the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war,
Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided
loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a
stranger from her father's past threatens Maria's carefully
constructed facade, she must finally confront her father's fate-and
her own. Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense
of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and
tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter
to life's bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long
shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work
The Washington Post calls 'a flash in the heavens that makes you
look up and believe in miracles.'
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