Introduction
Welcome to the website for Novels as Stories offered at OLLI, University of Delaware, Spring 2025, by Rebecca Worley.
Both online and inperson classes are available:
Wednesdays, 10:45 to noon, online via Zoom
Thursdays, 10:45 to noon, in person, Arsht Hall, room yet to be assigned
Book List
As usual, I'm grappling with the choice of novels to read and discuss for this upcoming term. But I know you want to get started with locating and reading, so here are a couple to begin with:
Mercury Pictures Presents, by Anthony Marra (549 pps).
New York Times bestseller, Winner of the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction
The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini’s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles—a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
A gorgeous book . . . sublime.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
Voted one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Guardian, and Booklist
Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.
Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won’t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.
Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate—and her own.
Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life’s bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls “a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles.”
NOTE: This book was also highly recommended by two long-time class members. Thank you for that. Also it's on the long side so I wanted to list it early to give you time to read. AND, it has a really interesting concept on perspective near the beginning, a visual perspective that we can talk about.
We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman (397 pps)
Amazon blurb: An Editors' pick for Best Books of the Year 2024, and New York Times bestseller
A brand new mystery. An iconic new detective duo. And a thrilling new murder to solve . . .
Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He still does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat waiting for him at home. His days of adventure are over. Adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s job now. Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. Working in private security, every day is dangerous. She’s currently on a remote island protecting mega-bestselling author Rosie D’Antonio, until a dead body and a bag of money mean trouble in paradise. So she sends an SOS to the only person she trusts . . .
As a thrilling race around the world begins, can Amy and Steve outrun and outsmart a killer? Solving murders. It’s a family business.
NOTE: We read and discussed The Thursday Murder Club, but this is a completely different rendering of the mystery genre, perhaps more of a "man's" novel, but we can discuss all that, and its "take" on the genre in general.