NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Winner of the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Historical
Fiction • 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 PhenomenaA genuinely moving and life-affirming
novel that’s a true joy to read.”—Celeste Ng author of Little Fires EverywhereA 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.”
