Stars in His Eyes

From the fascist Franco regime to Hollywood’s glamour—an epic historical novel based on the meteoric rise of one of the world’s most celebrated restaurateurs.

Ceferino Carrión is desperate for a new life—one of opportunity, fortune, and fame. But he knows he’ll never find this life in war-torn Spain. With his home country under the heel of the devastating Franco dictatorship and call-up papers on his doorstep, Cefe knows there’s only one thing he can do: run.

A new life awaits in America, as does a new name—Jean Leon. From the concrete valleys of the Bronx to the sun-soaked hills of California, Jean crosses paths with legendary superstars, political powerhouses, and dangerous mobsters as he flees his past and pursues his dreams. With friends like Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean to see him through, Jean soon gets his own taste of stardom, opening his glamourous Beverly Hills restaurant, La Scala, to nightly swarms of celebrities.

But with every new adrenaline rush of celebrity, Jean is further distanced from everyone he loves. Only in searching through his ever-receding past in Barcelona can he find the key to unlock the dream life he has risked so much to build.

Martí Gironell i Gamero is a journalist and writer born in Besalú in 1971. His debut work, The Bridge of the Jews, is the biggest bestselling historical novel ever written by a Catalan author and has sold over one hundred thousand copies. He’s written several novels set in different periods of Catalan history featuring universal protagonists. He currently works at Catalan national television TV3 and writes for the newspaper El Punt Avui. He is considered a master of the historical commercial genre, and his novels have brought renewed interest and fame to forgotten yet fascinating figures of southern Europe’s history.

Adrian Nathan West is a translator and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation. He is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review, mainly reviewing fiction in translation; his essays, short fiction, and translations have also appeared in the Guardian, McSweeney’s, the London Review of Books, 3:AM Magazine, and many other journals in print and online. He has translated books from German, Catalan, Spanish, and French, as well as short pieces from Galician and Italian, by authors such as Josef Winkler, Pere Gimferrer, and Marianne Fritz and for publishers ranging from MIT to Dorothy Project to New York Review Books. He is a contributing editor at the online translation journal Asymptote.