In 1970s Los Angeles, everyone is fighting to reach the top, but very few have the talent, ambition, and luck to get there.
THE SUNSET CROWD
by Karin Tanabe
St. Martin’s Press, May 2023
Evra Scott is an L.A. darling. The daughter of an Oscar-winning director and a Brazilian bombshell actress, Evra is the city’s reigning style queen. By day, she’s at the helm of Gypsy Abbott, the store beloved by Hollywood’s young and beautiful. By night, she’s on the arm of Kai de la Faire, Hawaii’s hottest export, and the screenwriter of the moment. Enter Theodora Leigh. The twenty-something Paramount assistant looks like a big screen star, but her sights are firmly set behind the scenes, as she fights to become a movie producer in a town where sex and sexism sell. Theodora’s got the talent and instincts, but she’s not willing to wait. Luckily, getting ahead by any means necessary is L.A.’s mantra. Observing it all is Bea Dupont, a photographer for Rolling Stone and Vogue, who never misses the party, but always keeps to its fringes. A Manhattan blue blood turned West Coast bohemian, Bea holds Evra’s Gypsy crowd together. She’s also Kai’s oldest friend, and she’s harbored a not-so-secret flame for him since they met at an elite Swiss boarding school. But in Hollywood, no one stays on top forever. And it’s not long before Theodora’s unrelenting ambition sets in motion a dramatic quest for power in an industry that is as glamorous as it is duplicitous. From the pulsating Sunset Strip to the French Riviera, Tanabe’s new novel is a story of survival and reinvention, of faking it until you make it, and the glittering appeal of wealth and power, as it seeks to answer that timeless question—who gets to have the American dream?
Karin Tanabe is the author of six novels, including A Woman of Intelligence and The Gilded Years (soon to be a major motion picture starring Zendaya, who will produce alongside Reese Witherspoon). A former Politico reporter, her writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, and Newsday. She has appeared as a celebrity and politics expert on Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and CBS Early Show. Karin is a graduate of Vassar College and lives in Washington, D.C.
As a little girl raised amid the hardships of Michigan’s Copper Country, Fenna Vos learned to focus on her own survival. That ability sustains her even now as the Second World War rages in faraway countries. Though she performs onstage as the assistant to an unruly escape artist, behind the curtain she’s the mastermind of their act. Ultimately, controlling her surroundings and eluding traps of every kind helps her keep a lingering trauma at bay.
In the small rural town of Qonda, South Africa, the power and water supplies are unreliable, property prices are down, and citizens are slowly suffocating in the acrid smoke from the municipal dump. Recently retired English teacher Megan Merton has lived here all her life, most of it at No. 8 Serpent Crescent. So who better than this self-styled pillar of society to shine a spotlight on the decline and dysfunction, not to mention the dubious activities, past and present, of many of her neighbours. Nefarious deeds and bad behaviour deserve harsh treatment and appropriate retribution, if not consignment to one of Dante’s fiendish nine circles of hell. At least that’s what Megan believes – in fact she’s been taking matters into her own hands, unnoticed, for years. And now she has decided to write it all down, to shake all of the skeletons loose, and rejoice in the inventive punishments she devised and personally delivered to the wicked.
Belleville 1860: Lavender Fitch is a twenty-eightyear-old spinster, whose station in life is diminished after the death of her father, the local apothecary. Her only inheritance is the family house along with its extensive gardens. To make ends meet, Lavender resorts to selling flowers at the local market.
In NO TWO PERSONS, Erica Bauermeister imagines the life of a novel sprung from the heart of a young woman named Alice, who loses her beloved brother too young. The novel Alice writes in tribute to him finds its way to a wide-ranging cast of characters: a literary agent and her assistant, an angry artist, a freediver, a movie intimacy coordinator, a homeless teenager, an exiled actor, an infatuated bookseller, and the caretaker of a ghost town. Together, their luminous and interconnected stories reveal how books can change us in the most unexpected of ways, connecting us not only to our own truths, but to our shared humanity.