'Round Midnight: A Novel - Hardcover

McBride, Laura

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501157787 ISBN 13: 9781501157783

Publisher: Atria Books, 2017

Synopsis

From the author of We Are Called to Rise comes a novel about the interconnected lives of four women in Las Vegas, each of whom experiences a life-changing moment at a classic casino nightclub.

What is it about the Midnight Room?

In a choreographic tour de force, Laura McBride twirls four women through a Las Vegas nightclub, turning their separate lives into a suspenseful, intricate dance of mothers, daughters, wives, and lovers.

The One Who Falls in Love: June hires a charismatic black man to sing at her club, but her fast-paced lifestyle runs aground as racial tensions mount.

The One Who Gets Lucky: Honorata leaves the Philippines as a mail-order bride, then strikes it rich in the Midnight Room.

The One Whose Heart Is Broken: Engracia finds bad luck in the Midnight Room and becomes enmeshed in Honorata’s secrets when she confronts a man with a gun.

The One Who Always Wondered: Coral struggles with her mysterious past until a desire to help Engracia steers her to the Midnight Room.

Wise and heartbreaking, jubilant and loving, ’Round Midnight is about the intensity and intimacy of four women’s lives, lives that are connected by secrets, courage, tragedies, and small acts of kindness. This brilliantly conceived, passionately written novel will resonate long after you turn the final page.

About this title

About the Author

Laura McBride lives in Las Vegas and teaches composition at the College of Southern Nevada. She is the author of the novels We Are Called to Rise and In the Midnight Room.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

’Round Midnight 1

To celebrate victory in Europe, June Stein dove headfirst off the Haverstraw Bridge.

A few months earlier, she had bought an eighteen-inch silver cigarette holder on a day trip to the city—snuck into the shop while her mother was choosing a hat next door—and spent the spring flicking ashes on the track as she smoked behind the stairs of the boy’s gym. In April she wore stockings to school, and bent over the water fountain to highlight the brown seams running along the backs of her legs. Leon Kronenberg said he had touched her breast. When Mr. Sawyer came back from the summer holidays with a goatee, June Stein breathed in, licked her lips, and shuddered.

She was bad for the neighborhood.

Things happened to other girls because of June Stein.

When she married Walter Kohn at nineteen, most people figured she was pregnant. June Stein would get her due. She’d be stuck in Clinton Hill for life; Walter Kohn was going to be bald in three years, like his father and his uncle Mort.

But at twenty, June Stein disappeared.

She was gone for six months.

When she came back, Walter Kohn had become something of a catch. People thought it was wrong that his wife had left him. They said she’d gone to Reno, gotten a divorce, that she’d never been pregnant, she had just wanted to have sex, and now that she’d had it, now that she’d used Walter Kohn—who did have beautiful blond hair and the bluest eyes—she’d gone and left him, and who knows what man she might try to take up with next.

June Stein returned a pariah.

It was a role she had cherished, but at twenty-one, she found it less amusing.

She had not gone to Reno.

She had gone to Las Vegas, and the lights and the shows and the desert air, the dust and the heat and the way one felt alone in the universe, were more appealing in memory than they had been when she lived them. There had been only a handful of Jews in town, and none she found interesting, so while she was waiting for the divorce, she hung around a different crowd: locals mostly, born and raised Nevadans, and some that had come in for the gambling boon. And they rose in stature after she moved back to her parents’ house, after even her friends expressed sympathy for Walter Kohn—who had taken the newspaper into the bathroom with him each morning—and there was the way her mother looked at her in the evenings, and the way her father kept asking if she would like to take a stenography course. One day June Stein packed a suitcase, including the eighteen-inch silver cigarette holder, called a taxi, and flew all night from Newark to Las Vegas.

She didn’t even leave a note.

But that was June Stein.

Prettiest girl in Clinton Hill.

And the only one who ever dove headfirst off the Haverstraw Bridge.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501157787
• ISBN 13: 9781501157783
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384