Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 256 p. Audience: General/trade.

Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 256 p. Audience: General/trade.

First edition. First printing. Hardbound. Fine/fine in all respects, a tight

First edition. First printing. Hardbound. Fine/fine in all respects, a tight clean copy. Comes with protective mylar dust jacket cover. The debut novel follows Marie Brown, a 39-year-old tabloid reporter and part-time philosophy-of-science autodidact in New York City, as she investigates the near-death of screen legend Nora Mars. The narrative blends classic Hollywood noir with contemporary romantic confusion and metaphysical speculation, weaving in Marie s fascination with quantum mechanics and unfinished academic ambitions. Critical reception noted the novel s intelligence and genre-blending wit. Muriel Spark called it a greatly intelligent work, entertaining, sometimes satirical, original, and inventive. Jenny McPhee is an unusually confident first novelist. The New York Times Book Review praised it as an engaging novel about big ideas in physics and big scandals in show business. According to Publishers Weekly, Her neurotic but appealing heroine, Marie Brown is chronically self-deprecating McPhee takes the risk with brio and acquits herself with élan. McPhee (b. 1962), daughter of noted nonfiction writer John McPhee, is also the author of "No Ordinary Matter" (2004) and "A Man of No Moon" (2007), and has gained recognition for her translations of Italian literature. Fiction.