It’s time for another Goodreads Monday, a weekly meme started by @Lauren’s Page Turners that invites you to pick a book from your TBR and explain why you want to read it. Easy enough, right? Feel free to join in if you’re feeling it! I think from this week’s post onward, I will use a random number generator to choose the books for this weekly meme!

This week the random number generator picked #621 on my GR ‘to-read’ list, and the books is: Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. Although this is #621 in a list of over 900 books, this is actually one of my more ‘recent-ish’ adds to my tbr, since I added it in December 2018! I guess I really add books quickly on GR don’t I? 😅This book has a rating of: 3.63 stars.

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men.

‎Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that once belonged to men, now soldiers abroad. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.

With the atmosphere of a noir thriller, Egan’s first historical novel follows Anna and Styles into a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers, and union men. Manhattan Beach is a deft, dazzling, propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in the lives and identities of women and men, of America and the world.

Why do I want to read it?

I’m pretty sure that I added this to my GR TBR after talking to my sister one day. She offhandedly mentioned that if I was looking for a book to read, one of her close friends had just finished reading Manhattan Beach and highly recommended it, so I should check it out too! I’m a big lover of historical fiction, I love being transported to past times, and when a mystery involving gangsters and divers and other intriguing elements, is thrown into the mix, I knew that I wanted to read this! If I’m not mistaken, this book won the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, so that’s also pretty cool. I’m definitely still keen to read this one and I’m looking forward to picking it up!

Have you read Manhattan Beach or is it also on your TBR?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below and let’s chat books!