If you’re a book nerd, you’re all in or nothing. That means you don’t just love reading, but everything about books. You love the look, the feel, the smell…

…and especially seeing how they’re made.

We take a step behind the curtain to see the design process of printing posters and covers for James Ellroy’s highly anticipated new novel Perfidia, the first book in his second ‘L.A. Quartet’. The first contained The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz, all of which were critically acclaimed bestsellers.

Order your copy of Perfidia here

Perfidia

by James Ellroy

A new novel from Ellroy is always a publishing event. That Perfidia is the first volume of his ‘Second L.A. Quartet’ makes this publication even more exciting.

It is December 6 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans – but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins.

The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police. He’s superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith – Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Kay Lake is a 21-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm centre that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls – comrades, rivals, lovers, history’s pawns.

Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America’s ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel.

Order your copy of Perfidia here

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About the Contributor

Andrew Cattanach

Andrew Cattanach is a regular contributor to The Booktopia Blog. He has been shortlisted for The Age Short Story Prize and was named a finalist for the 2015 Young Bookseller of the Year Award. He enjoys reading, writing and sleeping, though finds it difficult to do them all at once.

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