After the conclusion of World War II, a German Bohemian family is forced from its home in Czechoslovakia and beset by hardships in this debut novel.
During the war, invading German forces annexed Czech territories, causing considerable resentment against local German Bohemians and German Czechs. In 1945, the war is over, and following seven years of German occupation, the acrimony “had turned ugly, brutal, and violent.” Hans and Mattie Novak, two German Bohemians, fret anxiously over their increasingly precarious future and prepare for the worst-case scenario—a relocation, which would be daunting for them and their four kids. However, the decision is made for them when Hans is brutally beaten by local policemen and ordered to leave his beloved home immediately. Author Albert poignantly chronicles the harrowing plight of the Novaks, who attempt to cross through the forest into Austria and take temporary lodging at an American refugee camp. This refuge is short-lived, however, as the camp is ravaged by a typhus epidemic, and the disease nearly costs Mattie her life. The family finally makes their way to the home of Hans’ best friend, Heinrich. But Heinrich later savagely rapes and beats Mattie, which plunges her into a deep depression. In lucid, unflinching language, Albert ably captures the burdens of the Novaks’ exile over the course of the book. The author also affectingly limns the historical period in which they lived, as well as the ethnic divisions that roiled Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Second World War—and especially the hatred of a people that “wanted fierce revenge—cruel, violent revenge—and all with the blessing of President Beneš’ retribution decree.” Overall, Albert delivers a moving tale that’s emotionally authentic and historically astute.
A skillful and affecting combination of literary drama and historical research.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5255-5719-4
Page Count: 168
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2020
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | LITERARY FICTION
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A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.
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A financier's Ponzi scheme unravels to disastrous effect, revealing the unexpected connections among a cast of disparate characters.
How did Vincent Smith fall overboard from a container ship near the coast of Mauritania, fathoms away from her former life as Jonathan Alkaitis' pretend trophy wife? In this long-anticipated follow-up to Station Eleven (2014), Mandel uses Vincent's disappearance to pick through the wreckage of Alkaitis' fraudulent investment scheme, which ripples through hundreds of lives. There's Paul, Vincent's half brother, a composer and addict in recovery; Olivia, an octogenarian painter who invested her retirement savings in Alkaitis' funds; Leon, a former consultant for a shipping company; and a chorus of office workers who enabled Alkaitis and are terrified of facing the consequences. Slowly, Mandel reveals how her characters struggle to align their stations in life with their visions for what they could be. For Vincent, the promise of transformation comes when she's offered a stint with Alkaitis in "the kingdom of money." Here, the rules of reality are different and time expands, allowing her to pursue video art others find pointless. For Alkaitis, reality itself is too much to bear. In his jail cell, he is confronted by the ghosts of his victims and escapes into "the counterlife," a soothing alternate reality in which he avoided punishment. It's in these dreamy sections that Mandel's ideas about guilt and responsibility, wealth and comfort, the real and the imagined, begin to cohere. At its heart, this is a ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical. How far will Alkaitis go to deny responsibility for his actions? And how quickly will his wealth corrupt the ambitions of those in proximity to it? In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences and how disastrous it can be when such fragile bonds shatter under pressure.
A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-52114-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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Fierce, poetic, uncompromising.
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This extremely urban fantasy, a love/hate song to and rallying cry for the author’s home of New York, expands her story “The City, Born Great” (from How Long ’Til Black Future Month, 2018).
When a great city reaches the point when it's ready to come to life, it chooses a human avatar, who guides the city through its birthing and contends with an extradimensional Enemy who seeks to strike at this vulnerable moment. Now, it is New York City’s time to be born, but its avatar is too weakened by the battle to complete the process. So each of the individual boroughs instantiates its own avatar to continue the fight. Manhattan is a multiracial grad student new to the city with a secret violent past that he can no longer quite remember; Brooklyn is an African American rap star–turned–lawyer and city councilwoman; Queens is an Indian math whiz here on a visa; the Bronx is a tough Lenape woman who runs a nonprofit art center; and Staten Island is a frightened and insular Irish American woman who wants nothing to do with the other four. Can these boroughs successfully awaken and heal their primary avatar and repel the invading white tentacles of the Enemy? The novel is a bold calling out of the racial tensions dividing not only New York City, but the U.S. as a whole; it underscores that people of color are an integral part of the city’s tapestry even if some white people prefer to treat them as interlopers. It's no accident that the only white avatar is the racist woman representing Staten Island, nor that the Enemy appears as a Woman in White who employs the forces of racism and gentrification in her invasion; her true self is openly inspired by the tropes of the xenophobic author H.P. Lovecraft. Although the story is a fantasy, many aspects of the plot draw on contemporary incidents. In the real world, white people don’t need a nudge from an eldritch abomination to call down a violent police reaction on people of color innocently conducting their daily lives, and just as in the book, third parties are fraudulently transferring property deeds from African American homeowners in Brooklyn, and gentrification forces out the people who made the neighborhood attractive in the first place. In the face of these behaviors, whataboutism, #BothSides, and #NotAllWhitePeople are feeble arguments.
Fierce, poetic, uncompromising.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-50984-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | FANTASY | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY
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