Glen David Gold, author of the best seller Carter Beats the Devil, now gives us a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, heartrending and darkly comic, that captures the moment when American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging mecca of Hollywood intersect to spawn an enduring culture of celebrity. Sunnyside opens on a winter day in 1916 during which Charlie Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary delusion that forever binds the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world's last (and worst) Wild West star, as he finds unexpected love on the battlefields of France; Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America's doomed expedition against the Bolsheviks; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vise of complications - studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother. The narrative is as rich and expansive as the ground it covers, and it is cast with a dazzling roster of both real and fictional characters: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Adolph Zukor, Chaplin's (first) child bride, a thieving Girl Scout, the secretary of the treasury, a lovesick film theorist, three Russian princesses (gracious, nervous, and nihilist), a crew of fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants moviemakers, legions of starstruck fans, and Rin Tin Tin. By turns lighthearted and profound, Sunnyside is an altogether spellbinding novel about dreams, ambition, and the dawn of the modern age. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

From the bestselling author of Carter Beats the Devil comes an elegant blend of reality and fiction, war drama and Hollywood glamour. Gold sets into motion his cameo-heavy, multipronged plot with a bizarre incident in winter 1916, when Charlie Chaplin is spotted simultaneously in 800 places across the country, causing mass hysteria and panic. The primary story line follows Chaplin's struggles with women, creativity, film budgets and his opposition to the war. In a second, intersecting world, Leland Wheeler moves from the hinterlands to San Francisco with dreams of being a film star. He rechristens himself Leland Duncan, and though he gets shipped to the battlefields of France, the two ailing puppies he finds over there later provide his entree to the movie biz. Finally, Hugo Black is a Detroit gentleman who volunteers for the infantry in an uncharacteristic whim and finds himself fighting in America's secret invasion of Russia. The result is a dramatic narrative of chance and coincidence, and also a serious reconstruction of an evolving social landscape. It is wholly exhausting and entirely satisfying: to borrow an idea from Chaplin's great personal-artistic quest in the book, it's a work as good as Gold. (May) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Charlie Chaplin has just been sighted: he's afloat on a skiff off the Northern California shore, without oars or sail and drifting onto the rocks. Before rescue arrives, his boat sinks. A battered black derby floats, alone, on top of turbulent waters. But at the exact same time, he's seen all across America in hundreds of places. Thus begins a three-year roller-coaster ride through an America coming to grips with a war many wished we'd never gotten into and the attraction of a new and revolutionary phenomenon: the movies with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and.Charlie Chaplin, whose efforts to realize his destiny are the center of this fantastic farrago of a novel, which weaves from character to character and always returns to Chaplin. He's unfaithful, lecherous, and a bad son, but he has a genius for visual comedy that cries out to be realized. Gold (Carter Beats the Devil) has written another joyous comic novel that blends fact and fiction to the point where you won't really care what's true and what's not. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/09.]-David Keymer, Modesto, CA Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

*Starred Review* The phenomenal success of Gold's first book, Carter Beats the Devil (2001), a historical novel about the magician Charles Carter, makes it a hard act to follow. But Gold, fascinated by showmanship and illusion, celebrity and notoriety, had an equally alluring subject up his sleeve: Charlie Chaplin and the enchantment of early Hollywood. This brimming saga begins in 1916 with a bang and never lets up, as masterful storyteller Gold imagines Chaplin's horror over being condemned as a slacker because he isn't in uniform while the world is at war, his dread of his mother, an infatuation with a schoolgirl, and the longing to kill off the beloved Little Tramp in his produced-under-pressure 1919 film Sunnyside. Chaplin's ludicrous escapades are cleverly entwined with those of a family of grifters, a handsome rube whose love for dogs sustains him during his disastrous service in France, an aesthete ensnared in a military fiasco in Russia, and Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo's corralling of Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. The cascade of historic details Gold generates is breathtaking, but it is his electrifying characters, wildly inventive action replete with comedic mishaps and witty dialogue, and trenchant insights into the absurdity of war and the mythic dimension of movies that gather force and velocity to make this such a hilarious, brilliant, and transporting novel.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.