The book’s characters, some of whom escaped the regime of dictator Mussolini to come to the US, still must prove how American they are.

By Liz Ohanesian
FROM: OC Register

For months, novelist Anthony Marra had been “ping-ponging” between two book ideas, one set in Los Angeles and one placed in Southern Italy. Then, at the end of a trip to the Italian island Lipari, where his great-grandmother’s family had lived, Marra noticed a plaque dedicated to those who had been exiled to there during Mussolini’s regime.

He was reminded of something he found in his research on Los Angeles.

“German and Austrian emigrés would sometimes refer to L.A. as Sunny Siberia,” Marra says by phone from Oxford, Mississippi, where he had recently arrived for a stop on his book tour. “It struck me that the same term could have been applied to Southern Italy at the time. I realized that I wasn’t really choosing between two different books, but rather halves of the same novel, and it would tell the story of these two sunny Siberias on either ends of the world and this one family divided between them.”

The resulting book, the just-published “Mercury Pictures Presents,” connects World War II-era Hollywood, where a number of immigrants fleeing European fascism found success, with Mussolini’s Italy. The connection comes through the character Maria Lagana, who spent her childhood in Rome and adolescence in Los Angeles’ Lincoln Heights neighborhood, ultimately landing a job at a B-movie studio. After the U.S. enters the war, the studio pivots to making propaganda films. Meanwhile, Maria and her family, like many other Italian immigrants, have been labeled “enemy aliens.” Read Rest of Review Here