Critiques en avant-première

This is Elizabeth Brundage's third novel (The Doctor's Wife, "Somebody Else's Daughter") and will be launched August 9 from Viking. Stranger is an intricately structured roundelay with multiple characters and storylines which unfold gradually and subtly. Elizabeth juxtaposes the fraudulent, self-aggrandizing nature of Hollywood dealmaking with the existential drama played out on the warfront in the Middle East. Both volatile landscapes come together in the story, and events that should be important in war are brushed aside while a studio executive’s decision ultimately affects people’s lives and deaths. Among the characters are a hot shot movie studio executive who searches for a meaningful project. When she lashes out at an amateurish screenwriter’s exploitative script, the exec unknowingly sets a chain of events in motion with this one innocuous move. She unwittingly draws together a humiliated would-be screenwriter, a young waif who lives on the streets of Hollywood and an Iraqi war veteran suffering from PTSD who is left to deal with it alone when he returns to Los Angeles. Elizabeth has written an intense, provocative thriller about power, war, and the portrayal of women in film.