The Garden on Sunset: A Novel of Golden-Era Hollywood, Paperback

HOLLYWOOD...as seen through the eyes of its most infamous garden.When Marcus Adler's father runs him out of Pennsylvania, he can think of only one place to go: 8152 Sunset Boulevard, the home of luminous silent screen star Alla Nazimova, who visited him on his sickbed when he was a child. But when Marcus gets to Hollywood, Madame Nazimova's home has been converted to a hotel. Marcus checks into The Garden of Allah and starts his new life. He soon finds friends in Kathryn Massey, who ran away from her overbearing stage mother to become a journalist, and Gwendolyn Brick, a hopeful actress from the Other Hollywood-Hollywood, Florida-who wants to try her luck in Glitter City. The three na ve hopefuls band together to tread water against a tidal wave of threadbare casting couches, nervous bootleggers, human billboards, round-the-world zeppelins, sinking gambling boats, waiters in blackface, William Randolph Hearst, the Long Beach earthquake, starlets, harlots, Harlows and Garbos. But how will they get their feet inside Hollywood's golden door?THE GARDEN ON SUNSET is the first in a series of novels following Marcus, Kathryn and Gwendolyn as they leap and lurch, win and lose their way through Hollywood's golden years. If you love Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City books, you'll want to get lost in The Garden of Allah.

About the Author:

From an early age, Martin was enchanted with old movies from Hollywood's golden era-from the dawn of the talkies in the late 1920s to the close of the studio system in the late 1950s-and has spent many a happy hour watching the likes of Garland, Gable, Crawford, Garbo, Grant, Miller, Kelly, Astaire, Rogers, Turner, and Welles go through their paces. It feels inevitable that he would someday end up writing about them. Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Martin moved to Los Angeles in the mid-90s where he now works as a writer, blogger, webmaster, and tour guide.