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On the heels of his National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir Half a Life, Darin Strauss, author of the New York Times bestseller Chang & Eng, presents us with a wild and indelible story based on the loves and losses of Lucille Ball, the woman who became Hollywood\u2019s first true female mogul while navigating a tumultuous personal life.

In The Queen of Tuesday, Strauss mixes fact and fiction, memoir and novel, to bring us face-to-face with one of the world\u2019s most remarkable entertainers. The novel begins with a daring conceit: that the author\u2019s grandfather, Isidore Strauss, may have enjoyed\u2014and suffered as a result of\u2014a passionate affair with the legendary actress.

As Strauss shows, Lucille is a singular character\u2014the greatest screen idol the world has ever seen, and the most powerful woman in the history of Hollywood. She starred in America\u2019s first big-time interracial marriage. She loved hard. She may or may not have been a Communist. And she more or less single-handedly came up with the modern television business. When she got pregnant, she convinced a network that viewers would accept warmed-over episodes, thus creating the \u201cre-run.\u201d

While making millions laugh on the small screen, in private Lucille struggled. Her partner in that famously \u201chappy marriage\u201d that people tuned into, reliably, week after week, couldn\u2019t stay faithful. And she found it difficult to balance her ever-ascending fame with the demands of being a mother, a creative genius, an entrepreneur, a media tycoon, and, most of all, a symbol.

Did Strauss\u2019s grandfather actually have a relationship with the First Lady of Television? Who\u2019s to say he did, and who\u2019s to say he didn\u2019t? Regardless, The Queen of Tuesday vibrates with Lucy\u2019s inspiring and surprisingly human story at the same time it interrogates celebrity, media, the role of gender, and the manufacturing of glamour, offering a fresh view of a woman America adored, and reminding us all that, sometimes, you have to create your own reality.

Darin Strauss is the author of the bestselling novels Chang & Eng, The Real McCoy, More Than It Hurts You, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir Half a Life, and a bestselling comic-book series, Olivia Twist. Together, they\u2019ve been New York Times Notable Books and Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Amazon, and NPR Best Books of the Year. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Library Award, Strauss has been published in 14 languages and 19 countries. He has appeared on ABC\u2019s Good Morning America and CBS\u2019s The Late Late Show, and has collaborated on screenplays with Gary Oldman and Julie Taymor. Films based on Half a Life and More Than it Hurts You are in progress, and the TV rights to Chang & Eng have been optioned to Ilene Chaiken, a creative force behind The \u201cL\u201d Word, The Handmaid\u2019s Tale, and Empire. Clinical Professor of Fiction in the Graduate Writing Program at New York University, he lives in Brooklyn.