Also by David Ebershoff

Pasadena

Pasadena, David Ebershoff’s sweeping, richly imagined novel, is set against the backdrop of Southern California during the first half of the twentieth century and charts its rapid transformation from frontier to suburb. At the story’s center is Linda Stamp, a fishergirl born in 1903 on a coastal onion farm in San Diego’s North County, and the three men who upend her life and vie for her affection: her pragmatic farming brother, Edmund; Captain Willis Poore, a Pasadena rancher with a heroic military past; and Bruder, the mysterious young man Linda’s father brings home from World War I.

Pasadena spans Linda’s adventurous and romantic life, weaving the tales of her Mexican mother and her German-born father with those of the rural Pacific Coast of her youth and of the small, affluent city, Pasadena, that becomes her home. When Linda’s father returns from the war to the fishing hamlet of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea with the darkly handsome Bruder, she glimpses love and a world beyond her own. Linda follows Bruder to the seemingly greener pastures of Pasadena, where he is the foreman of a flourishing orange ranch, the homestead and inheritance of the charming bachelor Willis Poore. As Willis begins to woo her with the promise of money and stature, Linda is torn between the two men, unable to differentiate truth from appearance. Linda’s fateful decision alters the course of many lives and harbingers a sea change just on the horizon, for Pasadena and its inhabitants.

Infused with the rich sense of place for which Ebershoff’s work is known, Pasadena remembers a Southern California whose farms edged the Pacific, where citrus dominated the economy, and where America’s tycoons wintered in a vital city’s grand hotels. Recalling the California character of self-invention that informs the work of John Steinbeck and Joan Didion, Pasadena is a novel of passion and history about a woman and a place in perpetual transformation.

Praise for Pasadena

A New York Times expanded bestseller

A Wall Street Journal Editor’s Pick

A Chicago Tribune Best Book
of the Year

A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year

A Booksense 76 selection in both hardcover and paperback

“Wuthering Heights meets East of Eden.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Pasadena is like a grand opera. . . . [David] Ebershoff must be applauded for the grandness of his design, for grand characters, For grand setting, and . . . for his grand vision of Pasadena as the center of ‘real history.’”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Both a triumph of historical re-creation and a full-bodied romance . . . You feel that, if you were transported back to Pasadena in 1925, Ebershoff’s book would enable you to find your way around perfectly.”
—Baltimore Sun

“Ebershoff’s crafting of characters is so sharp, so perfect, that we ache for most of them. . . . [He] has us in thrall, and every word he writes counts."
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Full of detail and unerring language . . . magically evokes the rich and varied landscape of Southern California.’”
—The Boston Sunday Globe

“A luxurious tragedy . . . gorgeous, full of romance and disaster . . . Pasadena is a novel to get lost in.”
—The Christian Science Monitor