Alan is a New Jersey original, he was born in Englewood and lived in Cliffside Park, Edgewater, Palisades Park, and Haledon. (And he was a BooksNJ2013 keynote speaker.)
He has lived on the west coast since 1973 when he left for college at Cal State Long Branch and did graduate work at the UCLA Film School.
Alan has been nominated three times for an Emmy and won an Emmy Award for his work as a writer-producer on the television series LA Law. He also won the People’s Choice Award for LA Law. He’s received all sorts of accolades for his writing.
"Brennert writes his valentine to the New Jersey playground of his youth in Ragtime style, mixing fact and fiction. It's a memorable trip."
—People Magazine
"This nostalgic coming-of-age tale of a little girl with big dreams is the perfect read."
—Library Journal
Palisades Park by
Bestseller Alan Brennert's spellbinding story about a family of dreamers and their lives within the legendary Palisades Amusement Park Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey--especially for seven-year-old Antoinette, who horrifies her mother by insisting on the unladylike nickname Toni, and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele Stopka, at the stand where they sell homemade French fries amid the roar of the Cyclone roller coaster. There is also the lure of the world's biggest salt-water pool, complete with divers whose astonishing stunts inspire Toni, despite her mother's insistence that girls can't be high divers. But a family of dreamers doesn't always share the same dreams, and then the world intrudes: There's the Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor, which hits home in ways that will split the family apart; and perils like fire and race riots in the park. Both Eddie and Jack face the dangers of war, while Adele has ambitions of her own--and Toni is determined to take on a very different kind of danger in impossible feats as a high diver. Yet they are all drawn back to each other--and to Palisades Park--until the park closes forever in 1971. Evocative and moving, with the trademark brilliance at transforming historical events into irresistible fiction that made Alan Brennert'sMoloka'iandHonolulu into reading group favorites,Palisades Parktakes us back to a time when life seemed simpler--except, of course, it wasn't.
Honolulu by
From the bestselling author of the "dazzling historical saga" ( The Washington Post ), Moloka'i , comes the irresistible story of a young immigrant bride in a ramshackle town that becomes a great modern city "In Korea in those days, newborn girls were not deemed important enough to be graced with formal names, but were instead given nicknames, which often reflected the parents' feelings on the birth of a daughter: I knew a girl named Anger, and another called Pity. As for me, my parents named me Regret." Honolulu is the rich, unforgettable story of a young "picture bride" who journeys to Hawai'i in 1914 in search of a better life.Instead of the affluent young husband and chance at an education that she has been promised, she is quickly married off to a poor, embittered laborer who takes his frustrations out on his new wife. Renaming herself Jin, she makes her own way in this strange land, finding both opportunity and prejudice. With the help of three of her fellow picture brides, Jin prospers along with her adopted city, now growing from a small territorial capital into the great multicultural city it is today. But paradise has its dark side, whether it's the daily struggle for survival in Honolulu's tenements, or a crime that will become the most infamous in the islands' history With its passionate knowledge of people and places in Hawai'i far off the tourist track, Honolulu is most of all the spellbinding tale of four women in a new world, united by dreams, disappointment, sacrifices, and friendship.
Moloka'i by
Young Rachel Kalama, growing up in idyllic Honolulu in the 1890s, is part of a big, loving Hawaiian family, and dreams of seeing the far-off lands that her father, a merchant seaman, often visits. But at the age of seven, Rachel and her dreams are shattered by the discovery that she has leprosy. Forcibly removed from her family, she is sent to Kalaupapa, the isolated leper colony on the island of Moloka'i. In her exile she finds a family of friends to replace the family she's lost: a native healer, Haleola, who becomes her adopted "auntie" and makes Rachel aware of the rich culture and mythology of her people; Sister Mary Catherine Voorhies, one of the Franciscan sisters who care for young girls at Kalaupapa; and the beautiful, worldly Leilani, who harbors a surprising secret. At Kalaupapa she also meets the man she will one day marry. True to historical accounts, "Moloka'i" is the story of an extraordinary human drama, the full scope and pathos of which has never been told before in fiction. But Rachel's life, though shadowed by disease, isolation, and tragedy, is also one of joy, courage, and dignity. This is a story about life, not death; hope, not despair. It is not about the failings of flesh, but the strength of the human spirit.
