"A gorgeous, Technicolor take on America in the middle of the twentieth century."—Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Nickel Boys From the award-winning, bestselling author of Chang & Eng and Half a Life, a new novel about Lucille Ball, a thrilling love story starring Hollywood's first true media mogul.This indelible romance begins with a daring conceit—that the author's grandfather may have had an affair with Lucille Ball. Strauss offers a fresh view of a celebrity America loved more than any other. Lucille Ball—the most powerful woman in the history of Hollywood—was part of America's first high-profile interracial marriage. She owned more movie sets than did any movie studio. She more or less single-handedly created the modern TV business. And yet Lucille's off-camera life was in disarray. While acting out a happy marriage for millions, she suffered in private. Her...

In this stunning novel, Darin Strauss combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history's most famous twins. Born in Siam in 1811—on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River—Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world's stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage.Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss's narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers, and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the King of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century's most...