Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach is a historical novel by American writer Jennifer Egan. It was published in 2017 by Scribner. The National Book Foundation listed the book in their 2017 National Book Award Longlist in the Fiction category. Time magazine selected it as one of its top ten novels of 2017. Plot Eleven-going-on-twelve Anna Kerrigan and her father Eddie meet with gangster Dexter Styles in late 1934 at the Styles mansion on the shore of Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, New York City. Eddie is a former vaudeville performer who switched to become a stockbroker during the Roaring Twenties, then was ruined in the Great Depression. Now he makes very little money as a bagman in the criminal underworld, and he tells Styles he needs money to pay for a wheelchair for his brain-damaged and paralyzed daughter, Lydia, Anna's younger sister. Unknown to Anna, Eddie agrees to work for Styles in his gambling operations. Anna puts her bare feet into the wintry cold seawater at Manhattan Beach to prove her toughness; this childish bravado makes a lasting impression on Styles. At the age of 14, Anna loses her virginity with 16-year-old Leon, a boy from the neighborhood, meeting him repeatedly in their building's cellar. She keeps these trysts secret from her father, who disappears one day without a trace. In 1942 at the age of 19, Anna is working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to make warships for the US Navy in World War II. She has a repetitive job measuring small metal parts with a micrometer. She also takes classes at Brooklyn College. One day she sees a professional diver and starts training to be one. Against the wishes of diving officer Axel, she changes jobs to start working on underwater repairs. She faces the difficulty of being the first woman diver at the Navy Yard.