“If you give me the headache I’m starting to get.” She was not used to seeing her father nervous. She heard him swallow dryly and felt a chirp of worry in her stomach. Her father eased the Model J against the curb and turned off the motor. It was the last house on the street, which dead-ended at the sea. Then the house itself: a palace of golden brick three stories high, windows all the way around, a rowdy flapping of green-and-yellow-striped awnings. First the ride had distracted her, sailing along Ocean Parkway as if they were headed for Coney Island, although it was four days past Christmas and impossibly cold for the beach. Styles’s house before Anna realized that her father was nervous. Manhattan Beach takes us into a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers, and union men in a dazzling, propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in the lives and identities of women and men, of America and the world. “A magnificent achievement, at once a suspenseful noir intrigue and a transporting work of lyrical beauty and emotional heft” ( The Boston Globe), “Egan’s first foray into historical fiction makes you forget you’re reading historical fiction at all” ( Elle). 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, and TimeĪnna 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. The daring and magnificent novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author. Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

The book manhattan beach