exiles

"He was the author of The Green Hat, a novel that captured the spirit of a whole generation and made him a celebrity. She was the Countess Atalanta Mercati, the daugher of Greek nobility and born to command the luxuries of life. Their time was the 1920s and their friends were D.H. Lawrence and Hemingway, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. For a few golden years they had it all -- the money, the fame, the hotel suites in Paris and London, the big silent cars, the chauffeured speedboat, the beautiful white villa on the Riviera... and then bit by bit the picture darkened." Nominated for the National Book Award, this is the author's second book, an intimate portrait of the most flamboyant personality of the 1920s, his father, the novelist Michael Arlen, born Dikran Kouyoumdjian. It is a fine, moving story of a father-son relationship and an exploration of how family members struggle to find happiness with themselves and each other. Parts of this book originally appeared in "The New Yorker."