Manhattan Beach

"Manhattan Beach is less structurally daring than Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit From The Goon Squad, but she started researching this novel years before that one came out. It follows a father, his daughter and a mobster whose lives intersect in New York around World War II. Anna, the daughter, works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and in one scene she struggles under the crushing weight of a diving suit. As she enters the water, the weight disappears, and the suit lets her explore an unfamiliar world. Egan pulls off a similar trick with the mountains of research that went into this project: Instead of weighing the reader down, the historical details buoy the story, and the narrative flows like an easy current."