Description

It s 1973 and Mona Glass is a 24-year-old amateur tennis star in a long-running affair with Saul Plotz, her former college professor. Her parents like Saul and desperately want the free-spirited Mona to marry. But 34-year-old Saul already has a wife and two children. One day, Saul happens on an idea: stage a fake wedding for the benefit of her old world parents, invite a few friends in on the joke, and go about their lives.The ruse works. Except Saul realizes he actually wants to marry Mona, who vows never to permanently tie herself to a man. After losing her city job in the 1970s fiscal crisis, Mona becomes a freelance news photographer for a radical new tabloid. When she beats the competition to capture a photo of a murderous vigilante taking the city by storm, she finds herself falling for a colleague-and Saul, now a rising star in government who is butting up against a young man named Donald Trump, fears he has lost her altogether. Years later, the affair not quite dead, Mona realizes she is pregnant with Saul s child.Meanwhile, Saul s adult son, Tad, is traveling aimlessly across America, hunting for answers as the 1990s bleed into 9 11. Tad decides to take the darker path of the very vigilante Mona once exposed. And in the shadow of terrorism and war, Mona and Saul raise their son, Emmanuel, together-keeping their life a secret from Saul s wife and children. Spanning from the 1970s to the pandemic, this soaring, heartbreaking novel is a tour de force of ambition and grace, a great American chronicle that marks the emergence of a major new talent.