There are few, if any, American novelists who have received such consistent and high acclaim as Bruce Wagner. Be it the cult classic Force Majeure, the groundbreaking 'Cell Phone Trilogy' (I'm Losing You, I'll Let You Go, and Still Holding), or the Gatsby-like The Chrysanthemum Palace (a 2005 PEN Faulkner award finalist), critics and writers, from Michiko Kakutani to John Updike to James Ellroy, have hailed Wagner as our great fiction chronicler of Hollywood and the broken lives of La Vie L.A. With his richly orchestrated new novel Memorial, Wagner ventures far beyond filmdom's gates, interweaving the stories of four estranged family members coping with their lives in the wake of natural and unnatural global disaster - and creates a breathtaking saga of faith, redemption, and spirituality in the 21st century.

Wagner's friend James Ellroy is, of course, the author of The Black Dahlia, which has just hit the screens in Brian De Palma's movie version of this contemporary classic, as well as the novels The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz, all four of which are known as the L.A. Quartet. He's also the author of American Tabloid, and the memoir My Dark Places.