Knstlers in Paradise [Paperback]

APeopleBook of the Week
An NPR Best Book of the Year

A moving and entertaining novel about how we revisit memories to make meaning for ourselves and others. The Wall Street Journal

There was a time when the family K?nstler lived in the fairy-tale city of Vienna. Circumstances transformed the fairy tale into a nightmare, and in 1939 the K?nstlers found their way out of Vienna and into a new fairy tale: Los Angeles, California, United States of America.

For years Mamie K?nstler, ninety-three years old, as clever and glamorous as ever, has lived happily in her bungalow in Venice, California, with her inscrutable housekeeper and her gigantic St. Bernard. Their tranquility is upended when Mamies grandson Julian arrives from New York City. Like many a twentysomething, he has come to seek his fortune in Hollywood. But it is 2020, the global pandemic sweeps in, and Julians short visit suddenly has no end in sight.

Mamie was only eleven when the K?nstlers escaped Vienna in 1939. They made their way, stunned and overwhelmed, to sunny, surreal Los Angeles, where they joined a colony of distinguished Jewish musicians, writers, and intellectuals also escaping Hitler. Now, faced with months of lockdown and a willing listener, Mamie begins to tell Julian the buried stories of her years in Los Angeles: her escapades with eminent ?migr?s like Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Mann. Oh, and Greta Garbo. While the pandemic cuts Julian off from the life he knows, Mamies tales open up a world of lives that came before him. They reveal to him just how much the past holds of the future.