NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction The daring and magnificent novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author. Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, Esquire, Vogue, The Washington Post, The Guardian, USA TODAY, and Time Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, … TODAY, and Time
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. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men.
Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that once belonged to men, now soldiers abroad. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. 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.
“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). 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.
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The story grabs you right from the start. The characters are compelling and they grow on you so you can’t wait to see what will happen next. Great Read.
Complex story on many levels.
Egan is a very talented writer. Easy and engaging style– a pleasure to read.
interesting characters, fine descriptive evocative writing and research. drew me in to another time and place, specific to NYC especially Brooklyn
This book was a very slow starter . Once I got into it it was a little better and it was informative about the use of diving suits free and post-World War II and about the gangsters who own nightclubs around New York City during that time but all in all I was a bit disappointed as I usually like this author
While I enjoyed the historical information, i think the author attempted to cover too much and bounced too much between characters and timeframes. Almost felt as if it should have been two books instead of just one.
It blew me away. When I first saw the title, I though it was about “our” Manhattan Beach, the wealthy enclave here in So Cal, but instead it was about the east coast Manhattan Beach and the story she spun was incredible. The era, the characters and the plot utterly swept me away. In some ways it was reminiscent of a “Tree Grows in Brooklyn” but still thoroughly original. I’ll never forget the Kerrigans. Thank you Jennifer Egan. This book is a masterpiece.
I really enjoyed it. Very different. Surprising.
One of the five best books I’ve read in a decade. She is a mesmerizing author.
An interesting look at “life on the Home Front” during WW II, the role of women in the workforce during the war, and the level of criminality that continued unabated while the country was at war.
An interesting plot combined with great characters…. a good read!
Book Club read — This is a book I probably would not have read on my own. It is historical fiction, set around the Depression and WWII. It outlines the changes a man had to make to support his family during the Depression. Sadly, the man, Eddie Kerrigan, became a runner for a gangster. He involved his daughter, Anna, in the business by taking her to meet Dexter Styles when she was a young girl. The book follows Anna as she works at the Naval Yard in NYC. Anna works in the shop, but longs to become a diver. She has to overcome stereotypes and gender discrimination to get a chance. Along the way, she tries to solve the mystery of her father’s disappearance. She also becomes involved more intimately with Mr. Styles, and the reader also find out more about his business dealings and his family.
This book gave a lot of history about the naval yards, their part in WWII history, and the divers that worked on the ships. It also detailed a bit about the merchant marines, and the seedy underworld of gangsters. The book went on a bit long in parts. Some of the story went on too long, and other parts ended too soon for me.
The book is well written, and lyrical in its storytelling.
#ManhattanBeach #JenniferEgan
She had me at Dexter Styles. I love a strong character name and I wish there was more of him in the story. In this slice of life, historical work, Dexter is a gangster struggling with a Mafia-tight noose around his neck; an elegant man stuck in a brutal world. The desire to go clean is his major arc.
The heroine, Anna, is a woman trapped in the confines before women’s liberation, working at the Naval Yards in Brooklyn during World War II. Her arc is less clear.
The story starts with Anna meeting Dexter briefly at age 12 with her father, and then jumps to her as a twenty year old. Her father’s disappearance when she was a teenager has something to do with Dexter and it’s her re-connection with the gangster years later that drives the story. With trademark spare sentences and wordsmith ability for great description, Egan delivers another solid novel, although Manhattan Beach is shy of the emotional resonance and cohesion that her Pulitzer Prize winning novel – A Visit From the Good Squad – served up.
Ironically, that book covered several decades and had more characters than Manhattan Beach, yet was more seamless. I connected with Dexter more than the heroine Anna: his exterior and interior worlds were more interesting. With Anna, I couldn’t find solid footing on her inner core. Also, there seemed to be a vital scene missing; without spoiling it, the build up to Anna and Dexter’s re-connection felt loose. One more step was needed. A third tangent involving Anna’s father surfaces later in the book and could have been equally impactful with less page time devoted to it.
Overall, engaging, and a fine window into the shadowy world of gangsters.
Manhattan Beach is one of those novels, by an award-winning author, that lots of people are talking about. And having just finished, it, I’m not sure why. (Maybe it’s a New York Times bestseller because both the NYT and the book are located in New York.)
The book begins in Depression-era New York City, when the protagonist, Anna Kerrigan, is a 12-year-old girl who loves to accompany her father on business outings. One of the men he visits is Dexter Styles, a wealthy gangster living along Manhattan Beach. A few years later, Anna’s father disappears, and we witness the impact that event has on her mother, disabled sister, and Anna.
By the time World War II begins, Anna is 19 and one of the many thousands of women who wind up helping the war effort by working in at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. She happens to come across Dexter Styles again. Which causes her to begin wondering what happened to her father.
The chapters jump around, written from different characters’ perspectives. And different time frames. But my chief problem with this book is that I am not exactly sure what the book is supposed to be about. Is it about the possible crime surrounding Anna’s father’s disappearance? Is it about life for women factory workers during World War II? Is it the story of crime syndicates in New York City during this period? Perhaps it just intended to be a “period piece” showing a slice of life in New York at a moment in time. If so, it is somewhat successful, I guess.
But the first two-thirds of the book did not grab me. So much so that I considered dropping the book. Then, the last third was much more engrossing– almost, but not quite, a page-turner. And then, the end resolution felt pointless and contrived. And I found I didn’t really care much what happened to the characters.
Maybe if you’ve read the book, you can explain what I’m missing. I’d sure appreciate understanding all the attention this novel is getting.
Loved this book! It sucks you right in from the 1st chapter and keeps you going to the very end.
Thanks to NetGalley and to Scribner for providing me with an ARC copy of this book (due for publication in October) that I freely chose to review.
I read Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad a few years back and I was fascinated by its language, the stories, the way the story was told, and its inventiveness. When I saw Egan’s new book on offer at NetGalley I couldn’t resist. I have not read any of Egan’s other novels, but this one is very different from A Visit. For starters, this is a historical fiction novel. Both from the content of the novel and from the author’s acknowledgements at the end, we get a clear sense of how much research has gone into it. The novel covers a period around World War II, in New York and the surrounding area, and focuses on three stories that are interconnected, and are also connected to seafaring, the seafront, New York, and to the war era. The story goes backwards and forwards at times, sometimes through the memories of the characters, and sometimes within the same chapter, we get to see how that particular character got to that point. Although the story is narrated in the third person, we are firmly inside the character’s heads, and we can be at sea one minute, and the next at home remembering one gesture, a smile…
Anna Kerrigan is the strongest character and the one we spend more time with. We follow her story and know of her circumstances: a severely disabled sister, a father who disappears, and a mother who decides to go back to her family. Anna is a young woman, independent and determined to live her own life. She has never made peace with her father’s disappearance and remembers a strange encounter, when she accompanied her father as a child, with a man later revealed to be a gangster. Anna’s story was the one I was most interested in. Partly, because she was the character we got to know in more detail, partly because of her eagerness and determination, as she decides to become a diver and does not give up until she achieves her goal (at a time when being a woman severely limited one’s options, even during the war, when there were a few more openings, as she was already working at the Navy Yard). Her relationship with her sister, her training to become a diver (and you feel as if you were with her inside the incredibly heavy suit), and her obsession with finding out what happened to her father make her somebody to root for, although I found it difficult to engage at an emotional level with the character (it was as if she was contemplating herself at a distance and always analysing what she was doing, except for some brief moments when we get a sense of what she is feeling).
Dexter Styles is a strange character: he married a woman of the upper-class, and he has a good relationship with her father and her family, but by that point he was already involved in some shady deals and the underbelly of New York clubs and gambling joints, and he is smart, elegant, classy, but also ruthless and a gangster. I’ve read in a number of reviews that there are better books about New York gangsters of the period, and although I don’t recall having read any, I suspect that is true. I found the background of the character interesting, and his thoughts about the links between banking, politics, legal business, and illegal enterprises illuminating, but I am not sure I would say I completely got to know the character and did not feel particularly attached to it. (His relationship with Anna is a strange one. Perhaps it feels as if it was fate at work, but although I could understand to a certain extent Anna’s curiosity and attraction, Styles did not appear to be a man who’d risk everything for a fling. And yet…).
Eddie, Anna’s father, makes a surprise appearance later in the book and we get to learn something that by that point we have suspected for a while. From the reviews I’ve read, I’m probably one of the only people who enjoyed Eddie’s story, well, some parts of it. I love Melville (and the book opens with one of his quotes) and when Eddie is at sea, in the Merchant Navy, and his ship sinks, there were moments that I found truly engaging and touching. He is not a sympathetic character overall, as he takes a terribly selfish decision at one point in the book, but seems to redeem himself (or is at least trying) by the end.
This is a long book, but despite that, I felt the end was a bit rushed. We discover things that had been hidden for most of the book, several characters make life-changing decisions in quick succession, and I was not totally convinced that the decisions fitted the psychological makeup of the characters or the rest of the story, although it is a satisfying ending in many ways.
The novel’s rhythm is slow, although as I mentioned above, it seems to speed up at the end. There are jumps forward and backwards in time, that I did not find particularly difficult to follow, but it does require a degree of alertness. There are fascinating secondary characters (Nell, the bosun…), and the writing is beautifully descriptive and can make us share in the experiences of the characters at times, but I also felt it didn’t invite a full emotional engagement with them. I was not a hundred per cent sure that the separate stories interconnected seamlessly enough or fitted in together, and I suspect different readers will like some of the characters more than others, although none are totally blameless or sympathetic. An interesting book for those who love historical fiction of that period, especially those who enjoy women’s history, and I’d also recommend it to those who love seafaring adventures and/or are curious about Egan’s career.
Great story, great characters,great writing. I enjoyed every word
An excellent novel set during WW2 in the New York shipyards and the criminal underworld. I was confused during a couple of plot turns, but I’m often confused in my non-reading life too. It didn’t help me that I was listening to the audiobook. When certain characters were relating to one another in ways that didn’t make sense to me, I would backtrack and relisten to earlier sections in order to assure myself that I hadn’t accidentally missed one of the audio tracks. I hadn’t missed anything. I was disappointed by the lack of resolution and the lack of emotional payoff in the final chapters That being said, I still liked the book a lot. I enjoyed it for its moments and its vivid descriptions despite its overall structure. I loved Anna, and how her unique perspective drew me into the world of the shipyard in such a dynamic way.
I am so happy I got to finish reading this book. I love historical fiction and this book was wonderful.
I went into it not knowing what to expect. This is my first time reading Jennifer Egan and I am not disappointed.
So the book is interesting from the beginning with how she gives you the thought process into the 30’s and 40’s and how they felt about women and people of color. It is amazing to read and feel a part of that time and can resonant with the character and the sassiness of them. Anna I do like, and as a little girl she was already different, so much more than what her father and herself thought. From her trying to be a grown up to her sneaking away and losing her virginity, she has done a lot in her short time.
When her father Eddie disappears I thought she would have been more frantic then she was. her mother just was at wits end with Lydia, who when she passed brought tears to my eyes. Eddie and Lydia’s relationship was one of less ups and more downs, even though he always felt sad about how he was thinking about her.
Move forward a few years ahead, and I am very mad that Dexter was killed. Like all the shit he had done, and he gets killed over ego. Really pissed me off. That is why I gave it 4 stars, I really liked Dexter. I hope Mr. Q and his father in law fall hard, you can tell I was really upset.
The ending is very surprising but fitting for Eddie and Anna. It’s like they are in the throws of making up for lost time.
Not my usual fayre, and a bit slow to begin with, but it got better and better the more I read. Beautifully written, great vocabulary. And how did the author accumulate so much knowledge about the time and the subjects she wrote about? I’m almost at the end of the book as I write this review, and I shall be sorry for it to end. I’ve been rationing my nightly read in order to extend the pleasure of reading it. I don’t think there’s any greater accolade I could give an author.
Helps us visualize a time before, during and after World War II. The people and the times feel very real.