Manhattan Beach

Ms. Egan's capacity to include eloquent and unexpected details (how did she learn so much about deep sea diving, say?) to a complex, mesmerizing, and yet entirely accessible story line made this great book stand out for me.

Manhattan Beach is less experimental and more conventional than Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad and The Candy House, but it is every bit as moving, rich, and textured as those justly celebrated novels, and it contains one of the most touching father/daughter relationships that I've ever encountered in fiction.

A historical novel set in Depression and World War II-era New York City, Manhattan Beach begins with almost 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her rakish father, Eddie, on a mission to a wealthy gangster. A few years later, Eddie disappears after abruptly walking out on his family with no… show more.

Another WW2 story, this is the first Jennifer Egan novel I read, and I can’t remember why I pulled it from the shelf in the bookstore. Nevertheless, the noir tale of a young woman, Anna Kerrigan, working at a Brooklyn Navy Yard who "longs to walk along the bottom of the sea" had me hooked from that line. It is, in fact, something I once attempted as a child, weighing myself down with my father’s diving weights. I wasn’t successful, but I understand the longing to be underwater rather than above. I never achieved my dream, but Anna does. She… show more.

Mystery, intrigue, and an exploration of the dark underbelly of a community kept me turning the pages of Manhattan Beach. There aren’t many books written from the point of view of a woman working in a man’s world on the World War Two home front, and Egan paints an intimate portrait that puts the reader inside her protagonist’s head from the first page. A fascinating, detailed account wrapped in a compelling narrative.