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The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself in order to survive, moving from Mussolini's fascist Italy to 1940s Hollywood-a timeless story of love, sacrifice, and deceit from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.
When we first meet Maria Lagana in 1941, she's a highly talented but underappreciated scriptwriter at Mercury Pictures, Hollywood's worst studio that churns out monster movies and cut-rate romances. Maria's boss has escaped the anti-Semitism of Poland via Brooklyn, and he brings a refugee's grit and tenacity to the backlots of Los Angeles, imparting valuable lessons about playing around the edges of the law in order to survive to his young apprentice.
Maria herself is no stranger to transgression, however-she arrived in America as a child, after her father was arrested for anti-fascist activity in Rome. While Maria carefully revises scripts in order to evade Hollywood censors, Giuseppe Lagana is in a prison bloc in southern Italy, composing a dictionary that encodes messages to fellow resisters across the globe. When Giuseppe meets Nino and Corrado, a pair of scheming fellow prisoners who have concocted an escape plan that will take them all the way to L.A., he seizes his chance to communicate with his estranged daughter. But when a love triangle develops between the two men and Maria, Giuseppe's message is compromised, and a series of betrayals culminates in a murder on the backlot of Mercury Pictures-putting Maria and her family in a new kind of danger.
A story sprawled across two tethered worlds, each haunted by its own version of history, Mercury Pictures Presents is an epic novel of transformation, freedom, love, and forgiveness in a time of war and crisis.
When we first meet Maria Lagana in 1941, she's a highly talented but underappreciated scriptwriter at Mercury Pictures, Hollywood's worst studio that churns out monster movies and cut-rate romances. Maria's boss has escaped the anti-Semitism of Poland via Brooklyn, and he brings a refugee's grit and tenacity to the backlots of Los Angeles, imparting valuable lessons about playing around the edges of the law in order to survive to his young apprentice.
Maria herself is no stranger to transgression, however-she arrived in America as a child, after her father was arrested for anti-fascist activity in Rome. While Maria carefully revises scripts in order to evade Hollywood censors, Giuseppe Lagana is in a prison bloc in southern Italy, composing a dictionary that encodes messages to fellow resisters across the globe. When Giuseppe meets Nino and Corrado, a pair of scheming fellow prisoners who have concocted an escape plan that will take them all the way to L.A., he seizes his chance to communicate with his estranged daughter. But when a love triangle develops between the two men and Maria, Giuseppe's message is compromised, and a series of betrayals culminates in a murder on the backlot of Mercury Pictures-putting Maria and her family in a new kind of danger.
A story sprawled across two tethered worlds, each haunted by its own version of history, Mercury Pictures Presents is an epic novel of transformation, freedom, love, and forgiveness in a time of war and crisis.