Manhattan Beach Audiobook By Jennifer Egan cover art

Manhattan Beach

A Novel

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Manhattan Beach

By: Jennifer Egan
Narrated by: Norbert Leo Butz, Heather Lind, Vincent Piazza
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About this listen

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 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.

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.

©2017 Jennifer Egan (P)2017 Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction New York War

Editorial reviews

Editors Select, October 2017

In contrast to her Pulitzer Prize-winning and very modern A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach is traditional historical fiction in every way. Obviously impeccably researched, it's a sweeping novel steeped in the atmosphere of NYC, in particular the seaport neighborhoods of Brooklyn, from the Great Depression to WWII. Adding to Egan's brilliantly descriptive prose are the outstanding performances by narrators Norbert Leo Butz (two-time Tony Award winner), Heather Lind (TURN: Washington's Spies), and Vincent Piazza (Jersey Boys, Boardwalk Empire). This trio ups the ante, so to speak, making listening a truly immersive experience. —Tricia, Audible Editor

Editor's Pick

A WWII women diver in Brooklyn…multi-voiced.
"The novelist Jennifer Egan started out as a journalist, and at some point in the mid-90s—before she wrote and won the Pulitzer for A Visit from the Goon Squad in 2011—she became fascinated by the stories of women divers in WWII. Manhattan Beach is the fictional life of Anna Kerrigan—with all the historical detail and family drama a great novel can encompass. The three narrators who alternate chapters make the performance even richer."
Christina H., Audible Editor