A melodrama of the waning British Empire.
A young English wife becomes the mistress of a tea plantation in Ceylon and is quickly confronted with upheavals—racial, social, and domestic—in Jefferies’ U.S. debut.
Gwen, daughter of a landed Gloucestershire family, marries widower Laurence Hooper, descended from Ceylon’s original English settlers. Upon setting up housekeeping on the vast Hooper tea plantation, Gwen is puzzled by Laurence’s intermittent coldness toward her. Unable to get any information out of the family servants, not even longtime retainer and ayah Naveena, Gwen suspects that Laurence may be succumbing to the blandishments, financial and otherwise, of New York sophisticate Christina, a Wall Street trader. Another thorn is Verity, Laurence’s clingy sister, who refuses to get married while insisting that Laurence pay her an allowance. In a secluded grotto, Gwen discovers the grave of Laurence’s young son, Thomas, his child by his first wife, Caroline, and Laurence is circumspect about how Thomas died—as he is about the nature of Caroline’s final illness. At a planters’ soiree, Gwen spies Laurence dancing with Christina and feigns indifference by getting sloshed. Unable to recall what happened after being carried upstairs and put to bed by Savi Ravasinghe, a charming Sinhalese society portraitist, Gwen assumes the worse. Laurence and she having ironed out their conjugal wrinkles, she becomes pregnant, and, while Laurence is away, she gives birth to twins—a white boy and a girl clearly of mixed race. Naveena names the girl Liyoni and finds a family to raise her. Tormented by the loss of her daughter, secrets kept from and by Laurence, and revulsion for Savi, Gwen watches the painter flirt with every woman in sight and eventually become the toast of New York. Muddle the above with the Wall Street crash, mysterious thefts, and a couple of native uprisings, and we soon realize that this plot has painted itself into a corner from which only the unlikeliest of coincidences can extract it.
A melodrama of the waning British Empire.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49597-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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