Author(s): Paula Byrne

Fiction.

Madou is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Discovered in a Berlin cabaret in the roaring twenties, Madou is brought by a film director to the glamour of Los Angeles. There, she becomes a superstar of the silver screen. She takes important men and women into her bed. Hitler wants her to return to Germany and become the star of the Third Reich, but she loves her life as Hollywood's darling.

But the cost of beauty is always high, for those who have it and those who live in its shadow. Madou's daughter knows the pain of being ordinary beside her shining, golden mother - a woman who has bent and broken her, but whom she can't escape.

Evocative and deeply moving, this is a novel of mothers and daughters that tells the terrible story of time's war against beauty - and the unbearable pain when a star begins to fade.