Based on the author’s grandmother’s life story, this breakout novel from an acclaimed writer tells of a young woman who flees west in hopes of a second chance at life, only to find it complicated by the family she thought she left behind. "I couldn’t cook but I could sew. It would have been better the other way around.” So explains Nell Plat, who, at age seventeen, finds herself unhappily married and the mother of two baby girls. For a young woman with a hunger for excitement and glamour, Kansas circa 1900 offers nothing but a flat horizon. She finds joy in sewing and making dresses for women in town. Soon she begins to entertain ambitions she knows she cannot share. The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard is the story of what happens when Nell runs away to Los Angeles in the year 1901 as the new motionpicture industry is just taking root. Nell marries again, has a daughter, and goes into business in Hollywood as a costumer to the stars. But an unexpected knock on the door threatens to take apart the life Nell has so carefully built. Through the alchemy of art, Erin McGraw has deeply reimagined her own grandmother’s story. She has also drawn on the diaries of prairie women who lived in the late nineteenth century; it is their tart and poignant voices that create in McGraw’s protagonist “an irresistible and deeply compelling portrait of a young woman” (Margot Livesey). This “marvelous and memorable” author (in the words of Claire Messud) has etched a journey that will resonate with fans of classic novels of the American West.