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COUNT LUNA

Name: COUNT LUNA
Author: Alexander Lernet-Holenia
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2961-6

by Alexander Lernet-Holenia ; translated by Jane B. Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 2020

A pitch-dark tale about the wages of complicity in fascism.

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Paranoia tightens its grip on an Austrian aristocrat who condemned a man to a Nazi concentration camp. This novel, first published in German in 1955 and now reissued in the English translation published a year later, captures the bleak mood of guilt and fear that clouded Germany after World War II. Its protagonist, Alexander, is an Austrian industrialist who, as the story opens, has gone missing in Rome’s labyrinthine catacombs. Flashing back, we learn that the transport company he inherited had expropriated property belonging to one Count Luna in 1940. After raising a protest, Luna is arrested and sent to a camp in Mauthausen, Austria. The count’s fate after that is uncertain, but Alexander can’t shake the feeling that Luna survived, and after the war he grows certain that Luna has escaped the Nazis to haunt him and his family. His reaction is a projection of his anxiety over his family's tenuous sense of its nobility, but it has concrete and dire consequences; in due course, Alexander’s fixation makes him reckless and increasingly violent. As a portrait of Austrian nobility, the novel can get fussy, with many of its pages dedicated to Alexander’s long, tedious lineage. But as an interior study of how guilt rots a person from the inside out, it’s a fine psychological novel. Alexander’s mood shifts from callousness (“Probably even Luna himself, in Mauthausen, was now no longer a human being!”) to paranoia (“He is not going to persecute me and my family”) to insanity stoked by his nemesis’ namesake (“he had phases, phases like the moon…”). The novel dwells little on Nazism per se (“Nazi” never appears in the text, and “Hitler” only once), but it’s concerned with how fascism disrupted the comfort the upper classes enjoyed in the years before the Anschluss. For Lernet-Holenia (1897-1976), clinging to old, shallow glories leads only to madness, murder, and an eternity underground with a host of anonymous corpses. A pitch-dark tale about the wages of complicity in fascism.

Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-8112-2961-6

Page Count: 192

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
BARON BAGGE
by Alexander Lernet-Holenia ; translated by Richard Winston & Clara Winston

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THE CALAMITY CLUB

by Kathryn Stockett ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2026

Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.

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Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.

This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.

Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.

Pub Date: May 5, 2026

ISBN: 9781954118812

Page Count: 656

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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CIRCE

by Madeline Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2018

Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.

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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.

“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.

Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.