Manhattan Beach

De: Jennifer Egan

Narrado por: Heather Lind, Norbert Leo Butz, Vincent Piazza

Winner of the 2018 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

The long-awaited audiobook 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 12 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 nightclub 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.

Mesmerising, hauntingly beautiful, with the pace and atmosphere of a noir thriller and a wealth of detail about organised crime, the merchant marine and the clash of classes in New York, Egan's first historical audiobook 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 audiobook by one of the greatest writers of our time.

©2017 Jennifer Egan (P)2017 Little, Brown Book Group

Read it before they ruin it with a film version

Great listen. Interesting story set against the background of what life was like for women working for the war effort on the docks of New York, about gangsters, about the unions, about the warships. A thriller, a love story, a weepie.

The readers brought this story alive

Having a male and female reader worked well, although I the womans point of view was the strongest.