Künstlers in Paradise

When the world shuts down, Julian Künstler lands in Venice, California to help his indomitable grandmother Mamie after a small fall. He’s twenty-four, aimless, and licking his wounds; she’s ninety-three, sharp as glass, and brimming with a life’s worth of stories she’s finally ready to share. As days stretch into months, Mamie recounts the family’s late flight from Vienna in 1939, the shock and freedom of Los Angeles, and the ‘colony’ of German-speaking exiles who remade their lives by the Pacific. There’s the day a seagull died at Mamie’s feet as Greta Garbo stood beside her, the Thanksgiving when Hollywood’s glitter met Old World sorrow, and the afternoons when a demanding Arnold Schoenberg taught her both tennis and how to hear the future.

Outside, helicopters thrum and curfews return. Inside, the house fills with music, memories, and unexpected love: a neighbor named Sophie with a puppy; a friendship with a Black elder whose story reframes Venice; and a small miracle that frees Mamie’s loyal Agatha from old fear. By the time Julian’s parents fly in with plans for his return, he has something clear to say about the life he wants. This is a warm, funny, and piercing novel about exile and belonging, grief and reinvention, and how stories can make a home.

• Listeners who love intergenerational stories with humor and heart
• Fans of literary fiction set in Los Angeles and the émigré experience
• Anyone drawn to novels about art, exile, and finding a home

Cathleen Schine is the author of The Grammarians, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, and other acclaimed novels. A longtime contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, she writes with wit and warmth about family, art, and the oddities of American life. She lives in Los Angeles.