An Evening with Anthony Marra

Recommendation by Mirakel Kolbeck

Hilariously funny, with characters that feel so real you can almost reach out and touch them, and words that transport you into the past with every sentence. This is a story you won’t want to miss.

“No matter what villainy she pumped through its chrome keys, Maria still regarded her father’s typewriter as an instrument of mercy. Even now, all these years later, she can still feel her father’s eyes on her. He watched and waited to see what she did next.”

Step out of the present and into the mystical glamour of Hollywood in the 1940s in Anthony Marra upcoming political fantasy novel. Following the lives of Maria and Artie, the brains behind Mercury Pictures, a “fictitious low budget B-movie studio,” as they that get caught up in the in the “cross currents of culture, politics, business and morality, after trying to produce an expose on the spread of this totalitarian ideology in California called Golden State Fascist.”

Within Marra’s world, readers have the chance to walk onto the sets where the false fronts create a metaphor for this glamourous Hollywood society where “everyone watches one another,” yet behind those thin walls is the insidious underbelly, that censorship hides and this “Golden State Fascist” lurks.

Given the chance to listen to the opening pages of this novel, all I can say is that you should keep an eye out next year for the release of Anthony Marra's new book. Its one you won't want to miss.