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Mercury Pictures Presents cover art

Mercury Pictures Presents

By: Anthony Marra
Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan
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Summary

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, New York Times best-selling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

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'.

©2022 Anthony Marra (P)2022 Penguin Audio

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Engaging story, excellent narration

A saga involving lots of different lives in different time frames and countries in the first half of the twentieth century. A lot of characters to remember and sometimes I was a bit confused. But once I got into it I enjoyed it because although it is fiction it is based around true events - the rise of fascism, anti semitism and the war and so it gives added interest to the background and lives of the characters. It is in places heartbreaking yet has a lot of wit and humour and the sort of one-liners you wish you'd have thought of. I really enjoyed it and would recommend but I think I need to listen to it again to get the full picture of some of the minor players. I normally have the bad habit of racing through books but for this one I think one needs to go slower to properly absorb all the nuances - I think on a second listening it will be a five star. Now looking for other works by this author.

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A slow burn that engulfs.

It took me a long time to really get into this book. The opening chapters failed to grab me but slowly I became absorbed by the detailed and moving account of the immigrant experience and multiple layers of identity and performance. I imagine in would make a great book for Book Clubs to explore

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