by Knopf
First published 2023
In 1947, a damaged soldier returns from war and meets his five-year-old nephew before vanishing for over two decades. The boy grows up remembering his uncle's stories and becomes an underground comic artist in 1970s Oakland. When uncle and nephew reunite, they create a comic featuring the veteran as a World War II hero. Decades later, a successful Hollywood director stumbles upon their comic and decides to adapt it into a major superhero blockbuster. The nephew watches his personal family story transform into a star-studded production filled with temperamental actors, creative clashes, and the chaos of modern filmmaking. As cameras roll, the original comic's intimate wartime tale gets reshaped by Hollywood's machinery, raising questions about how personal stories become public entertainment. The book follows everyone involved, from the difficult male lead to the production assistants, showing how a family's private history becomes America's next big screen spectacle.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Oakland, United States
Period: 1947, 1970s, Decades Later
448 pages · Hardcover · Knopf