Lucille Ball, Hollywood’s first true media mogul, stars in this “bold” (The Boston Globe), “boisterous novel” (The New Yorker) with a thrilling love story at its heart — from the award-winning, bestselling author of Chang & Eng and Half a Life

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • “A gorgeous, Technicolor take on America in the middle of the twentieth century.” (Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Nickel Boys)

This indelible romance begins with a daring conceit — that the author’s grandfather may have had an affair with Lucille Ball. Strauss offers a fresh view of a celebrity America loved more than any other. 

Lucille Ball — the most powerful woman in the history of Hollywood — was part of America’s first high-profile interracial marriage. She owned more movie sets than did any movie studio. She more or less single-handedly created the modern TV business. And yet Lucille’s off-camera life was in disarray. While acting out a happy marriage for millions, she suffered in private. Her partner couldn’t stay faithful. She struggled to balance her fame with the demands of being a mother, a creative genius, an entrepreneur, and, most of all, a symbol.

The Queen of Tuesday — Strauss’s follow-up to Half a Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award — mixes fact and fiction, memoir and novel, to imagine the provocative story of a woman we thought we knew.