David Ebershoff

A historical novel which follows the parallel stories of Ann Eliza Young, the estranged wife of Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church in 1875, and her campaign to end polygamy in the United States, and Jordan Scott, the son of a polygamist family in twenty-first-century Utah, who returns after years away from the fundamentalist sect to learn the truth about his father's death.

Pasadena spans Linda’s adventurous and romantic life, weaving the tales of her Mexican mother and her German-born father with those of the rural Pacific Coast of her youth and of the small, affluent city, Pasadena, that becomes her home. When Linda’s father returns from the war to the fishing hamlet of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea with the darkly handsome Bruder, she glimpses love and a world beyond her own. Linda follows Bruder to the seemingly greener...