Mercury Pictures Presents Audiobook Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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 author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
“A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that’s a true joy to read.”—Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere
“A gorgeous book . . . sublime.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Guardian, Booklist
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 émigrés: 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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Mercury Pictures Presents Audiobook Narrator
Carlotta Brentan is the narrator of Mercury Pictures Presents audiobook that was written by Anthony Marra
About the Author(s) of Mercury Pictures Presents
Anthony Marra is the author of Mercury Pictures Presents
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- Author : Anthony Marra
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Mercury Pictures Presents Full Details
Narrator | Carlotta Brentan |
Length | 14 hours 2 minutes |
Author | Anthony Marra |
Category | |
Publisher | Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group |
Release date | April 28, 2024 |
ISBN | 9780593416372 |
Subjects
The publisher of the Mercury Pictures Presents is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. includes the following subjects: presents for dad, presents for men, new york times best sellers, summer reads 2022, historical, book club recommendations, spy, mom books, gifts for dad, literary gifts, history buff gifts, secrets, world war 2 books, world war 2, literary fiction, historical novels, refugee, gifts for men, gifts for women, Anthony Marra, beach reads, summer reading, summer reads, historical fiction books, espionage, spies, drama, family, historical fiction, resistance, war, love, movies, fascism, Italy, world war ii, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Fiction, Historical, Fiction, Sagas, Fiction, Literary The BISAC Subject Code is Fiction, Historical
Additional info
The publisher of the Mercury Pictures Presents is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The imprint is Random House Audio. It is supplied by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The ISBN-13 is 9780593416372.
Global Availability
This book is only available in the United States.
Frequently asked questions
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