Sunnyside by Gold, Glen David - 2009

New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2009. Advance Uncorrected Proof (reader's Edition), Trade paperback, Fine,. Meghan Wilson. New York: Knopf Publishing Group:, 2009. Advance Uncorrected Proof (reader's Edition), Trade paperback, Fine, 553 pp. Cover artwork by: Meghan Wilson From the author of the very popular CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL. A novel starring Charlie Chaplin. "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 star struck fans, and Rin Tin Tin."