World Pacific with author Peter Mann

Join author Peter Mann in conversation on his recent novel, World Pacific, a darkly comic novel of intrigue, adventure, and the perils of self-invention from the author of The Torqued Man, set in San Francisco and the Asian Pacific during the outbreak of the Second World War.

In 1939, just as the clouds of war are gathering, Richard Halifax—boys' adventure writer of manly bravado and the breeziest of prose styles—vanishes in the Pacific. Hildegard Rauch, an émigré painter and the daughter of Germany’s greatest living writer in exile, finds her twin brother in a coma after an attempted suicide. Simon Faulk, a British intelligence officer, has been assigned to ferret out Nazi spies in California.Told in the alternating voices of these three characters, set against the growing threat of another world war and a World’s Fair dedicated to peace, World Pacific is a madcap quixotic tale that explores the many forms of shipwreck, exile, betrayal, and the stories we tell ourselves in the fight to stay afloat.

“Far removed from the staid worlds of most historical fiction, this is a wonderfully comic, gripping, and intriguing novel—like All the Light We Cannot See, but with a wry, macabre humor—following three hugely different, yet brilliantly developed characters.” — Booklist

About the Author

Peter Mann is the author of the novels World Pacific and The Torqued Man, named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 and Best Historical Fiction of the year by CrimeReads. Originally from Kansas City, he is a longtime resident of San Francisco and teaches history and literature at Stanford. He also draws comics on his Substack newsletter The Quixote Syndrome, featuring errant sallies in history, literature, and the absurd.

Host or Publisher Mechanics' Institute