Typewriter Beach
A Novel
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Instant USA Today Bestseller · Washington Post 5 Works of Historical Fiction to Read This Summer · Top 10 Library Read · Los Angeles Times 10 Reads for a Beach Day · Publishers Weekly Summer Read · Woman’s World Book Club Pick · Zibby Books That’ll Make You Swoon · AARP Summer Read · The Today Show Best Historical Fiction for August
Set in Carmel-by-the-Sea and Hollywood, Typewriter Beach is an unforgettable story of the unlikely friendship between an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and a young actress hoping to be Alfred Hitchcock's new star.
1957. Isabella Giori is ten months into a standard seven-year studio contract when she auditions with Hitchcock. Just weeks later, she is sequestered by the studio’s “fixer” in a tiny Carmel cottage, waiting and dreading.
Meanwhile, next door, Léon Chazan is annoyed as hell when Iz interrupts his work on yet another screenplay he won’t be able to sell, because he’s been blacklisted. Soon, they’re together in his roadster, speeding down the fog-shrouded Big Sur coast.
2018. Twenty-six-year-old screenwriter Gemma Chazan, in Carmel to sell her grandfather’s cottage, finds a hidden safe full of secrets—raising questions about who the screenwriter known simply as Chazan really was, and whether she can live up to his name.
In graceful prose and with an intimate understanding of human nature, Meg Waite Clayton captures the joys and frustrations of being a writer, being a woman, being a star, and being in love. Typewriter Beach is the story of two women separated by generations—a tale of ideas and ideals, passion and persistence, creativity, politics, and family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clayton (The Postmistress of Paris) delivers an irresistible story of 1950s Hollywood featuring a restless ingénue who befriends a blacklisted screenwriter. It's 1957 and Isabella Giori has just debuted in a supporting role opposite Janet Leigh. She's hoping Hitchcock will pick her as his next favorite blonde actress, but the studio, having caught on that she's pregnant, sequesters her in Carmel, Calif., until she agrees to have an illegal abortion. In Carmel, she meets screenwriter Léon Chazan, who's out of work due to accusations that he's a communist. After Léon shares his work in progress for feedback, she's intrigued to find all the hallmarks of a great Hitchcock film, down to the part she envisions for herself, "the dreamboat of a girl who might be evil or might be good." A parallel narrative set in 2018 follows the late Léon's granddaughter, Gemma, an aspiring screenwriter who arrives at his Carmel cottage to prepare it for sale. After meeting aging star Isabella, who still lives next door, Gemma finds a script in her grandfather's safe that he wrote, which bears striking similarities to a film Isabella was credited with writing. Clayton expertly interweaves Gemma's, Isabella's, and Léon's tales as each attempt to forge their path in a cutthroat industry. Readers will be riveted.
