Gangster novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning Jennifer Egan

Corsair is publishing a new novel this year by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan called Manhattan Beach. 

Publishing on 3rd October, Manhattan Beach is set in an underworld of gangsters and sailors and takes place during the second World War era. It tells the intertwined stories of heroine Anna Kerrigan, the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s only female diver, her father Eddie Kerrigan, who works for both the union and the mob, and nightclub owner Dexter Styles, Eddie’s complex and charismatic boss.

UK and Commonwealth rights to the "haunting" and "heroine-driven" novel were acquired by James Gurbutt at Corsair, a division of Little, Brown Book Group, from Amanda Urban of ICM Partners, through Felicity Blunt at Curtis Brown. Egan changes publishers in the US for the book, moving to Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Egan, whose A Visit from the Goon Squad (Corsair) won her the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, commented: "Exhilarating though it was to immerse myself in an underworld of gangsters and sailors, the real imaginative leap in Manhattan Beach was into a time when the rules governing female behavior were still so rigid. The underground nature of female strength and sexuality allowed for a heroine-driven adventure story that would be hard to cast in contemporary America.”