From the acclaimed author of Anya and The Madness of a Seduced Woman - a spellbinding new novel that projects the interwoven lives, the yearnings and dreams, of two extraordinary women bound together by the deepest friendship. One is a star - the most beautiful, most mysterious film star of them all. She is the Scandinavian legend and enigma Anna Asta, the woman who reigned supreme in the 1920s and '30s, when her pale fire commanded an admiration bordering on worship. The other, unknown to the world, is Anna's housekeeper for two decades, Ivy Cook, whose rich, golden warmth reflects the perpetual summertime of her native Caribbean island, and who has become of first importance to Anna, as Anna is to her.
As they open up their lives to us, their voices alternate. Anna, now a recluse in New York - not so much bitter as disenchanted - carries us back to a childhood of grinding poverty and disappointment in Finland and Sweden, and to the moment when, at age seventeen, she is discovered by a great director and transformed into an icon of the silver screen. As she now recalls her desire and disgust for the man who discovered her, as she relives her Hollywood years of work, intrigue, glitter and celebrity, and her enormously famous but doomed love affair with Charles Harrow, the screen idol of his day, she begins to perceive her life as a melange of the parts she has played, the films she has seen, the stories she has read. Little by little she is driven to search for the self she has lost.
Where Anna's life seems compounded of glamorous shadows, Ivy appears to be centered, rooted in the earth. Her life seems rich with love, with lovers and friends, with family, grandchildren, ghosts. Yet Ivy, too, feels an emptiness of the heart that now must be filled - an emptiness created in her childhood, when she was stolen from her mother.
Remembering her beloved Green Island of long ago, Ivy speaks of Miss Blue, the "story tailor," who let it be known that people who were unusually unhappy could tell her their stories, and she would change those stories for them - take a nip here, a tuck there, until they were made to fit and feel comfortable. In First Nights, Anna Asta and Ivy Cook become story tailors, telling each other their stories, rearranging the events of the past, re-evaluating them, until finally - together - they find the one story that lies beneath the apparently patternless chaos of their lives.
Superbly told, crowded with all manner of fascinating people, rich in the exotic details of two wonderlands - the Caribbean Green Island and Hollywood - First Nights is a novel about private lives and public facades. It is about the unexpected friendships that save us when we have given up hope of being saved, and about how little we know our own lives even as we live them. Above all, First Nights is a powerful and moving testament to the human need for meaning, for finding at last the true and empowering story at the center of one's life.