Manhattan Beach

'One of the most dazzling novelists writing today . . . It is simply stunning; thrilling heartbreaking and unputdownable' the Bookseller Book of the Month.'Believe the hype' Evening StandardLonglisted for the US National Book Award for FictionThe long-awaited novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. 'We're going to see the sea' Anna whispered. Anna Kerrigan nearly twelve years old accompanies her father to the house of a man who she gleans is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants the lavishing of toys on the children and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles. Years later her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly and her lovely severely disabled sister. At a night club she chances to meet Styles the man she visited with her father before he vanished and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life the reasons he might have been murdered. Mesmerizing hauntingly beautiful with the pace and atmosphere of a noir thriller and a wealth of detail about organized crime the merchant marine and the clash of classes in New York Egan's first historical novel is a masterpiece a deft startling intimate exploration of a transformative moment in the lives of women and men America and the world. Manhattan Beach is a magnificent novel by one of the greatest writers of our time.'Egan's precise calm underwater prose is a persistent pleasure' Daily Telegraph 'A stunningly resourceful writer' Guardian