Book Review: ‘Manhattan Beach’

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
Publisher: Little, Brown
Publication Date: 3 October 2017

Synopsis: 

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles.

Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a night club, she chances to meet Styles, the man she visited with her father before he vanished, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have been murdered.

My thoughts: 

4 stars out of 5

‘Manhattan Beach’ was an absorbing and epic pageturner, immersing the reader in the inner lives of its characters from beginning to end.

The novel follows Anna Kerrigan, her parents Eddie and Agnes, and her disabled sister Lydia in New York in in the 1920s up to the early 40s as the US enters the Second World War. Also featured as a main character is Dexter Styles, a gangster with a conscience whose life becomes inextricably linked with the Kerrigan family as the years pass.

Set against the backdrop of gangsters, speakeasies, the mob and the docks, the reader watches Anna emerge into adulthood and a city preparing for war. She becomes a headstrong and confident character who pushes for what she wants and fights to be heard, all the while still holding onto the ghost of what she once believed her father was.

This was an excellent read, with a huge amount of research evidently going into this rich and engaging story. Highly recommended.