Delayed Rays of a Star

An NPR Best Book of the Year
A CrimeReads Historical Fiction Best Book of the Year

At a chance encounter at a Berlin soirée in 1928, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captures three very different women together in one frame: up-and-coming German actress Marlene Dietrich; Anna May Wong, the world’s first Chinese American star; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director of propaganda art films would first make her famous — then, infamous.

The trajectories of these women’s lives wind from Weimar Berlin to LA’s Chinatown, from the Bavarian Alps to the Champs-Elysées, and the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, victim, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. In the orbit of each star live secondary players whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left behind.

Intimate and clear-eyed, this is a visceral depiction of womanhood — its particular hungers, its oblique calculations, and its eventual betrayals.