Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Includes a behind-the-scenes conversation with bestselling novelist Amor Towles The epic story of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive in 1940s Hollywood and fascist Europe, a timeless tale of love, deceit, and sacrificeand a perfect book club pickfrom the award-winning author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel thats 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 fathers arrest. Fifteen years later, on the eve of Americas 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 wont 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, cant escape the studios narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Marias 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 migrs: 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 fathers past threatens Marias carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her fathers fateand 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 lifes 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.