Sunnyside Book

From the author of the acclaimed best seller Carter Beats the Devil comes a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, thrilling and darkly comic, that dramatizes 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 Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary mass delusion. From there, the novel follows the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world s last (and worst) Wild West star, as he heads to the battlefields of France; snobbish Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America s doomed engagement with Russia; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vice of complications studio moguls, questions about his...

The Barnes & Noble Review

Authorial ambition can be a two-pronged sword. Too little reach can collapse a novel into itself, substance never surfacing from the shallows of limited vision. Too much sweep can act upon the narrative like a herd of restive broncos breaking free from the corral, never to be united again.

Glen David Gold obviously has no problem embracing the big picture. His meaty historical fiction Sunnyside takes in World War I and the concurrent rise of commercial Hollywood, the interlocking strands of capitalism and communism, entrepreneurship both legal and illegal, and the illusory nature of romance as seen through the episodic travails of a slew of protagonists, including (as if small thinking was banished altogether from the novel's panorama) Charlie Chaplin -- whose 1919 short film Sunnyside lends the novel its title. But aiming big and actually achieving the big payoff isn't an assured equation.