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The Beautiful American Audiobook
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From Paris in the 1920s to London after the Blitz, two women find that a secret from their past reverberates through years of joy and sorrow.
As recovery from World War II begins, expatriate American Nora Tours travels from her home in southern France to London in search of her missing sixteen-year-old daughter. There she unexpectedly meets up with an old acquaintance, famous model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emerged from the war unscathed. Nora is racked with the fear that her efforts to survive under the Vichy regime may have cost her daughter's life. Lee suffers from what she witnessed as a war correspondent photographing the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.
Nora and Lee knew each other in the heady days of late 1920s Paris, when Nora was giddy with love for her childhood sweetheart, Lee became the celebrated mistress of the artist Man Ray, and Lee's magnetic beauty drew them all into the glamorous lives of famous artists and their wealthy patrons. But Lee fails to realize that her friendship with Nora is even older, that it goes back to their days as children in Poughkeepsie, New York, when a devastating trauma marked Lee forever. Will Nora's reunion with Lee give them a chance to forgive past betrayals and break years of silence to forge a meaningful connection as women who have shared the best and the worst that life can offer?
A novel of freedom and frailty, desire and daring, The Beautiful American portrays the extraordinary relationship between two passionate, unconventional women.
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“Mackin fictionalizes the lives of photographic artists Man Ray and his mistress, Lee Miller. The setting is fascinating, the real and fictional characters intriguing, and the story appealing. What will hold readers’ interest is the mystery of a missing daughter and the intersection of two very different women’s lives. Mackin builds a gripping plot.”
— RT Book Reviews (4 stars)
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“The Beautiful American, which readers will rank right up there with The Paris Wife, takes readers from the giddiness of the flapper era to the grittiness of World War II. It is a brilliant, beautifully written literary masterpiece. I love this book!”
— Sandra Dallas, New York Times bestselling author -
“An exquisitely imagined and beautifully rendered story of the talented, tragic, gorgeous Lee Miller.”
— Becky E. Conekin, author of Lee Miller in Fashion -
“Jeanne Mackin blends a tale as intoxicating as the finest fragrance. Spanning wars both personal and global, A Beautiful American leaves its essence of love, loss, regret, and hope long after the novel concludes.”
— Erika Robuck, national bestselling author of Fallen Beauty
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About Jeanne Mackin
Jeanne Mackin teaches creative writing at Goddard College in Vermont and has taught or conducted workshops in Pennsylvania, Hawaii, and New York. She lives with her husband, artist Steve Poleskie, in upstate New York. She is the author of several novels, including The Sweet By and By, Dreams of Empire, The Queen’s War, and The Frenchwoman.
About Kate Reading
Michael Kramer is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, and recipient of a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award. He is also an actor and director in the Washington, DC, area, where he is active in the area’s theater scene and has appeared in productions at the Shakespeare Theatre, the Kennedy Center, and Theater J.