The Glimmer Palace

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A big, intelligent, rich, and beautifully written literary historical novel: a story of identity, friendship, drama and love, and an illuminating account of a period in modern history that foreshadowed so much of the coming century.As the clock chimed the turn of the twentieth century, Lilly Nelly Aphrodite took her first breath. Born to a cabaret dancer and soon orphaned in a scandalous murder-suicide, Lilly finds refuge at a Catholic orphanage, coming under the wing of the, at times, severe Sister August, the first in a string of lost loves. There she meets Hanne Schmidt, a teen prostitute, and forms a bond that will last them through tumultuous love affairs, disastrous marriages, and destitution during the First World War and the subsequent economic collapse. As the century progresses, Lilly and Hanne move from the tawdry glamour of the tingle-tangle nightclubs to the shadow world of “health films” before Lilly finds success and stardom in the new medium of motion pictures and ultimately falls in love with a man whose fate could cost her everything she has worked for– or help her discover her true self.Gripping and darkly seductive, The Glimmer Palace showcases all the glitter and splendor of the brief heyday of the Weimar Republic, while telling the story of that other great twentieth-century illusion—cinema. As it foreshadows the horrors of the Second World War, The Glimmer Palace asks what price is paid when identity becomes unfixed and the social order is upended.