What is Susan Meissner reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Susan Meissner, author of Stars Over Sunset Boulevard.

Her entry begins:

I’m reading British author Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins and am nearly finished. I loved her previous novel, Life After Life, which is the very cleverly told story of a woman named Ursula Todd whose life keeps beginning and ending, again and again, as if she keeps getting a do-over so that she can be in a certain place at a certain time during the hell of WW2 and assassinate Adolf Hitler. This one, A God in Ruins, is a multi-time period look at one of Ursula’s brothers, Teddy, but Kate says in her Author’s Note that this book is not really a sequel to Life After Life, but should rather be seen as a continuation of one of Ursula’s many restarted lives.

Like Ursula’s story, A God in Ruins is another intellectual and wildly artistic novel that tosses conventional (linear) storytelling out the window. This book is not your typical novel construct, where Something happens and then Something else happens, and on and on we go in chronological order until the book ends. The story is...[read on]

About Stars Over Sunset Boulevard, from the publisher:

In this new novel from the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life, two women working in Hollywood during its Golden Age discover the joy and heartbreak of true friendship.

Los Angeles, Present Day. When an iconic hat worn by Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind ends up in Christine McAllister’s vintage clothing boutique by mistake, her efforts to return it to its owner take her on a journey more enchanting than any classic movie…

Los Angeles, 1938. Violet Mayfield sets out to reinvent herself in Hollywood after her dream of becoming a wife and mother falls apart, and lands a job on the film-set of Gone With the Wind. There, she meets enigmatic Audrey Duvall, a once-rising film star who is now a fellow secretary. Audrey’s zest for life and their adventures together among Hollywood’s glitterati enthrall Violet…until each woman’s deepest desires collide. What Audrey and Violet are willing to risk, for themselves and for each other, to ensure their own happy endings will shape their friendship, and their lives, far into the future.

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--Marshal Zeringue