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, 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.

This marks the second time that NUBClub has successfully predicted the One Book One New York novel, but given the last one was Americanah (which we pretty much universally disliked), we were not thrilled to find out NY was reading our book too. But we were pleasantly surprised by Egan here. This is probably the first thing we've read that felt truly genre and truly literary at the same time. The book is basically a noir mystery about a missing father, but we agreed that the presence of the protagonist's sister, a girl with cerebral palsy, elevated all of the struggles of the book. We talked a lot about how Egan used the war setting as a way to tell many stories of reinvention, and all of the main characters can be viewed through a lens of how they chose to reinvent themselves and whether the world would let them do it. We loved Anna and found the female characters fascinating in general. However, some of the plot contrivances of the end were a bit much to swallow. Really with the shipwreck? And as proud and as stubborn as Dexter Styles is, we find it hard to believe that anyone would decide to just throw on 1940s style diving equipment and jump into a river just to prove they're the boss. Overall, we liked the novel and though it was a big step above what usually passes for literary genre work, even if we had to ignore some convenient plot contortions.