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by Christine Mangan
A suspenseful, transporting literary thriller about a British novelist who heads to Venice after a public breakdown, by Christine Mangan, the bestselling author of Tangerine.
It's 1966 and Frankie Croy needs a break. Having achieved success with her debut bestseller, she's been trying desperately to live up to the high expectations of her editor and fans, only to fall short with each new book. When she receives a possible career-ending review and then has a very public breakdown, she retreats to her friend's vacant palazzo in Venice in the hopes the new setting will rejuvenate her creativity and inspire her writing.
But she finds that she's just as stuck. And then she meets a fellow British expat, a precocious young fan named Gilly who is eager to befriend her favorite author at all costs. An aspiring writer, Gilly worms herself into Frankie's Venetian life and the two begin an uneasy companionship. Frankie is skeptical of someone so relentlessly chipper, and Gilly tells stories that seem too good to be true, and in fact some of them are. This complicated web of desperate friendship, half-truths, and white lies―all set against a once-in-a-generation storm that inundates Venice and leaves it flooded―will lead Frankie to make a choice that is impossible to undo.
A gorgeously rendered and twisted tale of art and ambition, Palace of the Drowned is a literary thriller that asks just how far one is willing to go to achieve success.
"[A]n elegantly elegiac thriller...though not all the Highsmithian deceptions come off as equally convincing, Mangan, unlike Frankie, more than lives up to the promise of her debut." - Publishers Weekly
"A reference to Patricia Highsmith, like Chekhov's gun, will also play out, because Gilly has much in common with Ripley...[The novel's] tropes wind down in a not entirely unexpected but fitting way. Against the grim backdrop of off-season Venice, literary rivalry can be menacing." - Kirkus Reviews
"In her taut and mesmerizing follow up to Tangerine, the preternaturally gifted Christine Mangan plunges us into another exotic and bewitchingly rendered locale, this time Venice off-season, moody and damp, where well-known novelist Frankie Croy has gone to escape dark memories. Instead, a surprise entanglement with a mysterious young woman sets Frankie on edge, threatening to unravel her already precarious mental state. Voluptuously atmospheric and surefooted at every turn, Palace of the Drowned more than delivers on the promise of Mangan's debut, and firmly establishes her as a writer of consequence." - Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife and When the Stars Go Dark
This information about Palace of the Drowned was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Christine Mangan is the author of the national bestseller, Tangerine. She has her PhD in English from University College Dublin, with a focus on 18th-century Gothic literature, and an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Southern Maine.
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