Awards

• Long-listed for Women's Prize for Fiction 2018 (UK)
• Short-listed for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2018 (UK)
• Winner of Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2018 (UK)

Overview

"* Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction * New York Times Bestseller * A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of 2017 * Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction * Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, The Guardian, Vogue, Esquire, Kirkus Reviews, Philadelphia Inquirer, BookPage, Bustle, Southern Living, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch ""Immensely satisfying...an old-fashioned page-turner, tweaked by this witty and sophisticated writer...Egan is masterly at displaying mastery...she works a formidable kind of magic."" -Dwight Garner, The New York Times The 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. 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."

Full Product Details

9781472150905

Table of Contents

Reviews

Opening in Brooklyn during the 1930s Depression, Egan's superb novel follows its pioneering heroine into the Naval Dockyard where she works as a diver, repairing battleships amid the turmoil of the Second World War. Scenes describing her dangerous descents to the seabed in her 200lb diving suit and claustrophobic helmet make you almost hyperventilate with tension. Suspense of other kinds tingles through an ingeniously constructed plot from the author of the Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. * Sunday Times, 2017's Best Books * One of the joys of my reading year was Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach. She tells an intimate and unusual story set in Brooklyn in the second world war, centred around the flinty Anna Kerrigan who becomes the only woman training to be a diver in the Navy Yard, and whose difficult home life is drawn with great compassion. Egan captures marvellously the precarious heightened atmosphere of wartime New York. * Kirsty Wark, The Guardian Best Books of 2017 * The novel I most enjoyed was Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach, a historical thriller that was quite as visionary and stylish as one would expect from the author. * Tom Holland, The Guardian Best Books of the Year * Exhaustively researched and fluently told, the novel creates a fully believable world with characters we can identify with and care about. A quietly absorbing read. * Derby Telegraph * A luminous New York story . . . To find a compelling story well told, one that is full of complex characters and sentences so luminous they stop you in your tracks, is one of literature's greatest pleasures. That pleasure is bestowed liberally by Jennifer Egan in Manhattan Beach. * Irish Times * Egan effortlessly weaves these issues into a compelling story of a young woman seeking both to prove herself in a man's world * Running in Heels * Thoroughly realised characters, an involving plot - a triumphant achievement * Woman & Home * Rich in historical detail, full of seductive characters and teeming with human incident, Manhattan Beach proves once again what a gifted storyteller Egan is ... Manhattan Beach is an enthralling mystery tale * Tatler * [An] electrifying thriller noir . . . it's gloriously addictive. * Saga magazine * Egan's descriptive writing is superlative . . . She creates intelligently drawn characters, sensitively explores their inner worlds and takes care to use her historical research wisely.' * Sunday Times * Anna is a formidable heroine: passionate, stoic, emotionally and physically courageous. Her younger sister is an invalid for whom her glamorous showgirl mother has abandoned her career; the descriptions of caring for this beautiful, beloved and helpless child are tender and moving. * The Times * Flawlessly done, with enough of a spin on the usual historical-novel tropes to make the whole enterprise seem surprisingly fresh. The flawlessness includes ease of consumption: I read the book in one sitting without effort and without even noticing that I wasn't tempted to check my social media. * Financial Times * Egan's first foray into historical fiction, this is a more conventional book than her fans might expect, but it's as darkly immersive an experience * Mail on Sunday Event * An absorbing narrative . . . brilliantly realised * the Spectator * Fine turns of phrase, a richly imagined environs and a restless investigation into human nature . . . Egan really looks, and so do her characters. This is a novel that deserves to join the canon of New York stories. * New York Times Book Review * Genuinely affecting and handsomely constructed * Independent * A fabulous read * Independent, Autumn's Best Books. * A gripping, modern version of a 19th century novel . . . such an absorbing read. * Evening Standard * Egan explains her wish to write a 'heroine-driven adventure story' set at a time when women had little freedom to steer their own lives. She has succeeded magnificently . . . here, the detail serves only to deepen and enrich. Mystery novels, thinks Anna, are unsatisfying in part because they take place 'in a single realm' only. The genius of this book is that Egan successfully plumbs so many. * Daily Mail * This is a novel that will pull you in and under and carry you away on its rip tides . . . Anna's plight as a woman whose will is larger than her circumstances is dramatised with tremendous power. Its resonances continue to wash over the reader long after the novel ends. * the Guardian * Beautifully rendered . . . genuinely affecting and handsomely constructed. It moves for all the right reasons. * Independent *

Exhaustively researched and fluently told, the novel creates a fully believable world with characters we can identify with and care about. A quietly absorbing read. * Derby Telegraph * A luminous New York story . . . To find a compelling story well told, one that is full of complex characters and sentences so luminous they stop you in your tracks, is one of literature's greatest pleasures. That pleasure is bestowed liberally by Jennifer Egan in Manhattan Beach. * Irish Times * Egan effortlessly weaves these issues into a compelling story of a young woman seeking both to prove herself in a man's world * Running in Heels * Thoroughly realised characters, an involving plot - a triumphant achievement * Woman & Home * Rich in historical detail, full of seductive characters and teeming with human incident, Manhattan Beach proves once again what a gifted storyteller Egan is ... Manhattan Beach is an enthralling mystery tale * Tatler * [An] electrifying thriller noir . . . it's gloriously addictive. * Saga magazine * Egan's descriptive writing is superlative . . . She creates intelligently drawn characters, sensitively explores their inner worlds and takes care to use her historical research wisely.' * Sunday Times * Anna is a formidable heroine: passionate, stoic, emotionally and physically courageous. Her younger sister is an invalid for whom her glamorous showgirl mother has abandoned her career; the descriptions of caring for this beautiful, beloved and helpless child are tender and moving. * The Times * Flawlessly done, with enough of a spin on the usual historical-novel tropes to make the whole enterprise seem surprisingly fresh. The flawlessness includes ease of consumption: I read the book in one sitting without effort and without even noticing that I wasn't tempted to check my social media. * Financial Times * Egan's first foray into historical fiction, this is a more conventional book than her fans might expect, but it's as darkly immersive an experience * Mail on Sunday Event * An absorbing narrative . . . brilliantly realised * the Spectator * Fine turns of phrase, a richly imagined environs and a restless investigation into human nature . . . Egan really looks, and so do her characters. This is a novel that deserves to join the canon of New York stories. * New York Times Book Review * Genuinely affecting and handsomely constructed * Independent * A fabulous read * Independent, Autumn's Best Books. * A gripping, modern version of a 19th century novel . . . such an absorbing read. * Evening Standard * Egan explains her wish to write a 'heroine-driven adventure story' set at a time when women had little freedom to steer their own lives. She has succeeded magnificently . . . here, the detail serves only to deepen and enrich. Mystery novels, thinks Anna, are unsatisfying in part because they take place 'in a single realm' only. The genius of this book is that Egan successfully plumbs so many. * Daily Mail * This is a novel that will pull you in and under and carry you away on its rip tides . . . Anna's plight as a woman whose will is larger than her circumstances is dramatised with tremendous power. Its resonances continue to wash over the reader long after the novel ends. * the Guardian * Beautifully rendered . . . genuinely affecting and handsomely constructed. It moves for all the right reasons. * Independent *

Author Information

Jennifer Egan is the author of A Visit From The Goon Squad, The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her non-fiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.

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