City of Smoke & Sparks
She came to New York to disappear. He made her want to be seen.
City of Smoke and Sparks
Maria Decristoforo steps off an overnight train at Grand Central with a cardboard suitcase, fifty dollars stitched into the lining of her coat, and a name she has chosen for herself: Diana Grant.
She is eighteen, running from a factory town and a man who hurt her. She finds a bed on Orchard Street, a job sewing costumes in the back of a shoestring theater in Greenwich Village, and a quiet place to vanish into the work of her hands.
Then Theodore Calloway walks into the costume shop. Playwright. War veteran. Heir to a banking dynasty he refuses to inherit. He keeps inventing reasons to come back — a button, a hem, a paragraph he wants her opinion on. He leaves a copy of My Ántonia on her sewing table with a note in the margin. She leaves a note of her own. What grows between them, in the slow exchange of books and arguments and stolen hours, is the most dangerous thing Diana has ever owned: someone who sees her.
But Diana has a name she cannot afford for anyone to uncover, and Teddy's mother has resources Diana cannot begin to imagine. In the speakeasies and salons of a city vibrating at a frequency only the young can hear, two people try to build a life out of the wreckage of the ones each of them left behind.
The Burning Years
Two decades. One impossible love. Six books that follow Diana and Teddy from the bohemian theaters of Prohibition-era Greenwich Village to the edge of a second world war.
After New York, the story moves west into the chaos of silent-film Hollywood, then across the Atlantic to expatriate Paris in the last gilded years of the Jazz Age. It returns to America for the long shadow of the Crash and the Depression, and finishes in London and on the Continent as the lights begin to go out over Europe. Each book is its own complete love story; together, they trace the making of a writer and the survival of a marriage across the most turbulent two decades of the twentieth century.
Book One, City of Smoke and Sparks, is available now. Further volumes to come.
About Anna Ivors
Anna Ivors lives somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard, in a house with too many books and not enough shelves.
She has held a number of jobs she doesn't talk about, read more novels than is probably advisable, and spent an unreasonable amount of time in the archives of cities she may or may not have lived in.
City of Smoke and Sparks is her debut novel and the first of six planned books in The Burning Years. She is already writing the next one.
Get in Touch
For press inquiries, interview requests, rights, or a note from a reader — Anna would love to hear from you.
anna.ivors@yahoo.com