Putting aside his half-finished dissertation, Rick sets up office in Mrs. W-, he gets drawn into a world of privilege and wealth far different from his racially mixed, blue-collar beginnings. But as he grows closer to the iconoclastic, charming, and feisty Mrs. W-, the heir to an oil fortune, he sees it at first simply as a source of extra cash. When he lands a job as a research assistant for the elderly Mrs. Rick Nagano is a graduate student in the history department at USC, struggling to make rent on his South Los Angeles apartment near the neighborhood where his family once lived. With her two Walter Mosley-like gifts-impeccable narrative pacing and masterful command of Los Angeles' intricate, evolving dynamics of race and class-Nina Revoyr's LA novels convincingly capture the lifespan of Los Angeles as a major city, none more gracefully than A Student of History. Nina Revyor's new novel, A Student of History, continues the tradition of the Los Angeles oil novel, but steers it in a new direction.

With a nod to Great Expectations and The Great Gatsby, Rick Nagano is Nick Carraway and young Pip rolled into one.Lambda Award-winner Revoyr focuses on the impact of race in the construct of class and society, and how there are some doors that will always remain closed. It's a contemporary novel that feels like an instant classic, with the wry tragedy of The House of Mirth, the sinister glamour of Sunset Boulevard, and a fresh, original point of view. a fiction writer with an eye for reality set in a dream-like world, often in her home city of Los Angeles.Īny Nina Revoyr novel is a cause for celebration, and her latest, A Student of History, is assured and marvelous, an absorbing rags among riches tale about a broke USC grad student who finds himself swept off his feet by Los Angeles's insular, powerful. Literary Hub, one of Lit Hub's 50 Favorite Books of 2019Ī Student of History is full of research, detail, lush descriptions, and visual place-setting. Revoyr's latest noir tells a story that's somewhere between Sunset Boulevard and the darker regions of The Great Gatsby.Revoyr is a subtle observer of human foibles and social structures, and the result is one of the most insightful, and the most entertaining books of the year. All of her books are filled with suspense and sudden surprises that take the stories in unexpected directions.As much as Nina Revoyr herself is a student of history, she's also one of our best teachers.

Furthermore, like the most adroit novelists, Revoyr specializes in reversal. Revoyr is gifted in her ability to deal with complex ideas like racism, class conflict, and sexuality without sacrificing the truth of her narrative. A contemporary Los Angeles story of uncrossable social lines, allegiance and betrayal, immeasurable power, and the ways the present is continually shaped by the past.

The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr