
very, very welcome." - Slate, Groundbreaking. This is a big novel that moves with agility." -Dwight Garner, New York Times, Advanced Praise for Manhattan Beach: "Egan's propulsive, surprising, ravishing, and revelatory saga, a covertly profound page-turner that will transport and transform every reader, casts us all as divers in the deep, searching for answers, hope, and ascension." - Booklist (starred review), "It's an astutely executed piece of historical literature that's also unafraid to indulge in the thrills of its rich plot." -Minneapolis City Pages, "Reading Manhattan Beach feels restorative. Egan's fiction buzzes with factual crosscurrents, casually deployed. It's an old-fashioned page-turner, tweaked by this witty and sophisticated writer so that you sometimes feel she has retrofitted sleek new engines inside a craft owned for too long by James Jones and Herman Wouk. is a dreadnought of a World War II-era historical novel, bristling with armaments yet intimate in tone. It is a magnificent novel by the author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, one of the great writers of our time.

Manhattan Beach is a deft, dazzling, propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in the lives and identities of women and men, of America and the world. With the atmosphere of a noir thriller, Egan's first historical novel follows Anna and Styles into a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers, and union men. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have vanished. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that once belonged to men, now soldiers abroad. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war.


She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men. Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, Esquire, Vogue, The Washington Post, The Guardian, USA TODAY, Time * A New York Times Notable Book Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NEW YORK'S "ONE BOOK, ONE NEW YORK" PICK Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction The daring and magnificent novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
