From the nationally bestselling author of The True Memoirs of Little K, a deeply felt and historically detailed novel of family, loss, and love, told by an irrepressible young girl—the daughter of a two-bit gangster and a movie showgirl—growing up in golden-age Hollywood and Las Vegas in its early days.
Esme Silver has always taken care of her charming ne’er-do-well father, Ike Silver, a small-time crook with dreams of making it big with Bugsy Siegel. Devoted to her daddy, Esme is often his "date" at the racetrack, where she amiably fetches the hot dogs while keeping an eye to the ground for any cast-off tickets that may be winners.
In awe of her mother, Dina Wells, Esme is more than happy to be the foil who gets the beautiful Dina into meetings and screen tests with some of Hollywood’s greats. When Ike gets an opportunity to move to Vegas—and, in what could at last be his big break, to help the man she knows as "Benny" open the Flamingo Hotel—life takes an unexpected turn for Esme. A stunner like her mother, the young girl catches the attention of Nate Stein, one of the Strip’s most powerful men.
Narrated by the twenty-year-old Esme, The Magnificent Esme Wells moves between pre–WWII Hollywood and postwar Las Vegas—a golden age when Jewish gangsters and movie moguls were often indistinguishable in looks and behavior. Esme’s voice—sharp, observant, and with a quiet, mordant wit—chronicles the rise and fall and further fall of her complicated parents, as well as her own painful reckoning with love and life. A coming-of-age story with a tinge of noir, and a tale that illuminates the promise and perils of the American dream and its dreamers, The Magnificent Esme Wells is immersive, moving, and compelling.
Set in golden age Hollywood and the burgeoning days of Las Vegas, The Magnificent Esme Wells is a dazzling, bittersweet story of family, love, and deception. We follow Esme—the irrepressible daughter of a Mafia gofer and a Busby Berkeley showgirl—as she comes of age amid racetracks and casinos, mobsters and starlets, on her path to becoming the first burlesque artist on the Las Vegas Strip.
Young Esme Wells spends her days where no child should. She wanders the Hollywood Park racetrack trailing her gambling-obsessed father, and the MGM soundstages following her too-beautiful chorus-girl mother, both parents bit players in the big, jostling worlds of mobsters and movie moguls of late 1930s Los Angeles. Illiterate, unkempt, intelligent, and willful, Esme is as ambitious as her parents, and these three opportunists struggle to force the world to open up its fortunes to them. When her father moves to Las Vegas just after the war—to help Bugsy Siegel open his famous Flamingo Hotel—Esme accompanies him. And there, the daughter, now a stunner like her mother, catches the attention of one of the new Strip’s most powerful men.
Narrated by the twentysomething Esme, The Magnificent Esme Wells moves between pre–WWII Hollywood and postwar Las Vegas—a golden age when gangsters and movie moguls were often indistinguishable in their scramble for power. Esme’s voice—sharp, observant, with a quiet, mordant wit—chronicles the rise and fall and further fall of her complicated parents, as well as of her own painful reckoning with love and life. A coming-of-age story with a tinge of noir, The Magnificent Esme Wells portrays the promises and perils of the American dream and its dreamers.
“[I]n this lush saga of the new American West... Adrienne Sharp has given us a protagonist to hope for and a powerful new version of the American dream.”
