Mercury Pictures Presents

《生命如不朽繁星》作者安東尼．馬拉全新力作。懷揣童年不可告人的秘密，Maria與母親逃離墨索里尼時代的義大利，來到好萊塢。二戰之際，Maria工作的水星製片正與她那搖搖欲墜的私生活一樣徘徊在破產邊緣。戰後世界仍一片狼藉，機會卻悄悄降臨，水星製片因流亡藝術家湧入前景光明，強烈野心驅使Maria越爬越高，直到一名不速之客帶來童年的秘密拉住她的腳步。

The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini’s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles―a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022―BookPage

Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.

Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional life from falling apart. Her mother won’t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.

Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate―and her own.

Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life’s bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work the Washington Post calls “a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles.”