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Ava Barry Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Ava Barry

Ava Barry

Ava Barry Biography

Ava Barry was a script reader for Bold Films and Intrigue Entertainment, and an editorial assistant for Zoetrope: All-Story, Francis Ford Coppola's literary magazine. Windhall is her first novel. She lives in Australia.

Ava Barry's website

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Interview

Hollywood Noir: In Ava Barry's 'Windhall', an unsolved 1948 murder obsesses L.A. journalist Max Hailey decades later.

You've lived in Australia for several years. Was it a challenge to write about Hollywood, both old and contemporary, from such a distance?

I'm actually a native Californian who lived in Los Angeles for three years after college in Santa Cruz. On my days off I would drive around and visit all these famous sites: the Witch House in Beverly Hills, filming locations for Chinatown, Westwood Memorial Park where Marilyn Monroe's crypt is. I'm obsessed with both present-day Los Angeles and the city's rich history.

What is it about the golden age of Hollywood that grabbed you to begin with?

It contained the perfect balance of incredibly talented people and a limited amount of authority or oversight. Even in the '40s, Hollywood was still considered by some to be the Wild West. Adventure and new frontiers have always appealed to me, and Los Angeles in its infancy was kind of the last American frontier. It grew to become this chaotic adult playground. The craziest story I read is probably the one about the corpse of John Barrymore: director Raoul Walsh borrowed his friend's dead body from a funeral home and took it to Errol Flynn's as a prank. Events like that were the norm. There was a haunting element to many of the stars' lives, which...

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Books by this Author

Books by Ava Barry at BookBrowse
Shoot the Moon jacket Windhall jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Ava Barry but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Howard Blum

    Howard Blum

    Howard Blum is the author of, the national bestsellers Wanted!, The Gold of Exodus, and Gangland. Currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, Blum was also a reporter at the New York Times, where he won numerous ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Windhall

    Try:
    American Lightning
    by Howard Blum

  • Amy Chua

    Amy Chua

    Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She is an internationally bestselling author of several non-fiction titles, including her 2011 memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which was a runaway... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Windhall

    Try:
    The Golden Gate
    by Amy Chua

We recommend 5 similar authors

View all 5 Read-Alikes

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Top Picks

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    Graveyard Shift
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    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
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    The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of ...
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    At the start of Maame Blue's The Rest of You, Whitney Appiah, a Ghanaian Londoner, is ringing in her...

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    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

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