With its flavor of Henry James, Harrower’s rediscovered story is an odd, brittle yet impressive piece of work that exposes...
A previously unpublished novel by an Australian author whose work from the 1950s and ’60s has recently found new popularity reveals how a privileged daughter’s bright future leads to misery.
Harrower (The Watch Tower, 2013, etc.) published four novels more than half a century ago, then withdrew the fifth before its scheduled publication and stopped writing. Available now for the first time, the book returns readers to characteristic Harrower terrain via the finely scrutinized interior lives of two very different pairs of siblings divided by social status, assumptions and, above all, psychologies. Zoe and Russell Howard are the gilded children of notable, well-connected parents living in middle-class comfort in Sydney. A chance meeting on a train introduces Russell to Stephen Quayle and then his sister Anna, whose parents’ deaths in a car accident left them under the damaging guardianship of an uncle and his disturbed wife. While Anna seems to have emerged relatively intact, Stephen is angry and judgmental, and beautiful, talented Zoe—“There was something enchanting and winning and touching about her, and she knew it”—is electrified by his difference. Years later, after Zoe has begun a promising career in the film industry in Europe, her mother dies, and returning to Australia, she is reunited with Stephen. Soon they are married, but the honeymoon phase, with Zoe trying to “cure” Stephen of his unhappy past, slowly evolves into something more destructive, as Stephen’s mix of tenderness and abuse slowly eats away at her. Formal in tone and cerebral in style, Harrower’s novel proceeds in a sequence of snapshot episodes dominated by semiabstract conversations. It takes a late kind of theatrical coup to push the actors out of their frozen roles into a reconfigured future.
With its flavor of Henry James, Harrower’s rediscovered story is an odd, brittle yet impressive piece of work that exposes the complex passions beneath a drawing-room-scenario surface.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-922182-29-6
Page Count: 257
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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