Dust & Ashes
She had already told him everything. Now she had to decide whether to tell everyone else.
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.
Parallel Fires
A continent apart, two people who once built a life together try to build new ones alone — and discover that some fires don't go out for the distance.
In Hollywood, Diana Grant fights her way up from the cutting room toward the only thing she has ever wanted: her name on the work she writes. At Pacific Crown Pictures the men call her a script girl and mean it as a leash. She shares a house, and a careful arrangement, with the film star Enzo Mancini — a continental heartthrob to the public, a flat-voiced Brooklyn boy behind closed doors.
Three thousand miles east, Teddy Calloway is learning to write sober. The play that will make his name is taking shape one hard, clear morning at a time. But the city that nearly drowned him still knows his old habits by their first names, and the past that bound him to Diana has not finished with either of them.
Towering Flames
They finally stopped withholding the truth from each other. Now they must find out if that is enough.
Paris, 1926. Diana Grant has spent years defending the name she built for herself — in bylines, and now, after a fight she nearly lost, in the screen credit that finally puts Diana Grant on a movie poster. So when Teddy asks her, again, to marry him, on the deck of the ship carrying them both to France, she gives him the only honest answer a woman still guarding something this hard-won can give: someday. Not yet.
Paris hands them the life they always wanted, and they take it with both hands. A flat below Sacré-Cœur. Teddy's play, sober and triumphant, on a real stage in a language he's only beginning to love. A friendship with Colette — sharp-tongued, unbothered, asking nothing of Diana that the rest of the world hasn't already claimed. And a Paris that seems built for two people who have finally run out of reasons to hold back from each other, in their shared home, with all the time in the world and nowhere else they'd rather be. A summer on the Côte d'Azur burns even hotter, the sun and the sea stripping away whatever restraint Paris left standing.
But old wars don't stay buried just because the world has stopped asking questions. A journalist named Gilles Marchand is circling a quieter, more dangerous question than the one already answered on the front page — not who Diana was, but why she really ran. And at the bottom of every glass raised at every late supper on the Rue de Vaugirard, the thing Teddy fought four hard years to outrun is still there, waiting for the night his luck finally gives out.
Dust and Ashes
She had already told him everything. Now she had to decide whether to tell everyone else.
November 1929. Diana Grant and Teddy Calloway come off a ship at a New York pier eight days into being fully back together — ten years deep and one week old at the same time, which is a thing only the two of them could manage — and walk into a country that has just stopped believing its own arithmetic. The wire that called them home from Paris said two things at once: the bank is exposed, and his father has collapsed.
Teddy goes down to Wall Street by day and sits in a sickroom on East Seventy-Third by evening, sixteen months sober and holding. It is the emergency that's holding him. That is not the same thing as discipline, and they both know it. Everything he built in Paris is on the wrong side of an ocean — his doctor, his theater, his Tuesdays. The emergency runs out before the losses do.
What Diana says to him then, in a public ward with his hand shaking in hers, is one sentence long: wherever I'm standing in August, I'll be facing this direction. She spends the next year and a half making it true — from a room back on Orchard Street, where she started, doing buttonholes at eleven cents the dozen, while a paragraph runs in four newspapers asking why a girl of eighteen walked out of a Massachusetts shoe factory without stopping to collect her wages. She knows the answer. She's been writing it down, too: fourteen hundred words a night, two hundred and thirty-one pages, twelve of which no house in New York will print on nothing but the word of the woman it happened to.
And when Teddy comes back to her, he doesn't come home. He comes courting — four flights up on a Tuesday, hat in his hand in a boarding-house hall, a man asking for something he knows he has no standing to expect, from a woman who has never once been able to want a thing without first counting what it will cost her. She told him someday on a ship's deck in 1926. This is the book where they find out what someday costs.
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.
Books One through Four, City of Smoke and Sparks, Parallel Fires, Towering Flames, and Dust and Ashes, are 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. Four are now in print. 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