Delayed Rays of a Star: A Novel

A dazzling debut novel following the lives of three groundbreaking womenamp;mdash;Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahlamp;mdash;cinema legends who lit up the 20th century.

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, who would wend her way into Hollywood as one of its lasting icons; Anna May Wong, the world's first Chinese American star, playing for bit parts while dreaming of breaking away from her father's modest laundry; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director would first make her famousamp;mdash;then, infamous.

From this curious point of intersection, Delayed Rays of a Star lets loose the trajectories of these women's lives. From Weimar Berlin to LA's Chinatown, from a seaside resort in East Germany to a luxury apartment on the Champs-Élysées, the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, muse, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. And in the orbit of each star live secondary playersamp;mdash;a Chinese immigrant housemaid, a German soldier on leave from North Africa, a pompous Hollywood directoramp;mdash;whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left in her own time, as well as in ours.

Amanda Lee Koe's playful, wry prose guides the listener dexterously around murky questions of ego, persona, complicity, desire, and difference. Intimate and raw, Delayed Rays of a Star is a visceral depiction of womanhoodamp;mdash;its particular hungers, its calculations, and its eventual betrayalsamp;mdash;and announces a bold new literary voice.