Sunnyside - Hardcover

Gold, Glen David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307270688 ISBN 13: 9780307270689

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2009

Synopsis

Glen David Gold, author of the best seller Carter Beats the Devil, now gives us a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, heartrending and darkly comic, that captures the moment when American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging mecca of Hollywood intersect to spawn an enduring culture of celebrity.

Sunnyside opens on a winter day in 1916 during which Charlie Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary delusion that forever binds the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world’s last (and worst) Wild West star, as he finds unexpected love on the battlefields of France; Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America’s doomed expedition against the Bolsheviks; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vise of complications—studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother.

The narrative is as rich and expansive as the ground it covers, and it is cast with a dazzling roster of both real and fictional characters: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Adolph Zukor, Chaplin’s (first) child bride, a thieving Girl Scout, the secretary of the treasury, a lovesick film theorist, three Russian princesses (gracious, nervous, and nihilist), a crew of fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants moviemakers, legions of starstruck fans, and Rin Tin Tin.

By turns lighthearted and profound, Sunnyside is an altogether spellbinding novel about dreams, ambition, and the dawn of the modern age.

About this title

Review:

A kaleidoscopic tale of romance and intrigue...This is a book to remind you of the pleasures of chuckling aloud in public...After a dazzling debut, he has managed to pull off a consummate, ambitious encore. Sunnyside is a cane-twirling, bowler-doffing triumph (Christian House, Independent on Sunday)

An insanely ambitious novel...entertaining and thought-provoking (Aravind Adiga, Financial Times)

An epic - and suitably cinematic - tale...Gold displays a prodigious gift for storytelling, with a succession of scintillating set pieces and audacious one-liners...fantastic (Time Out)

A breathless stupendous novel...From lighthouse to Hollywood to starlets to war to stardom to madness to genius Gold's startling narrative carries us across the world and back. Gold proves himself yet again to be the hungriest craftiest funniest and most humane novelist we have. (Junot Díaz)

An elegant blend of reality and fiction, war drama and Hollywood glamour . . . It is wholly exhausting and entirely satisfying: to borrow an idea from Chaplin's great personal-artistic quest in the book, it's a work as good as Gold. (Publishers Weekly)

This brimming saga begins in 1916 with a bang and never lets up...The cascade of historic details Gold generates is breathtaking, but it is his electrifying characters, wildly inventive action replete with comedic mishaps and witty dialogue, and trenchant insights into the absurdity of war and the mythic dimension of movies that gather force and velocity to make this such a hilarious, brilliant, and transporting novel. (Booklist)

Book Description:

By the author of the bestselling CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL, a novel in which Charlie Chaplin collides with the First World War in a panoramic tale about the dawn of our modern age

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0307270688
• ISBN 13: 9780307270689
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 559