A riveting, complex tale of the courage of ordinary people.
From the end days of the Weimar Republic through the rise of Hitler and the atrocities of World War II, four women boldly defy the Nazis, risking their own lives and those of their loved ones.
Chiaverini’s (Enchantress of Numbers, 2017, etc.) latest historical novel masterfully reimagines the real lives of Mildred Fish Harnack, an American who moves to Berlin to pursue her doctoral degree in American Literature and reunite with her German husband, Arvid; Greta Lorke, a German woman returning from studying abroad at the University of Wisconsin, hoping to make her mark as a writer in the theater world; and Martha Dodd, the politically naïve daughter of the newly appointed American Ambassador to Germany. Linking these women together with the fictional character of Sara Weitz, a Jewish student of American literature, Chiaverini spins a fascinating web of relationships. As the Nazis place increasingly severe restrictions on non-Aryans, Arvid’s cousin Dietrich Bonhoeffer is surveilled for speaking out against the regime, and Mildred finds employment difficult to get, while the jobs that do exist require loyalty oaths to the Nazi Party. Meanwhile, Greta has found love with Adam Kuckhoff, an influential dramaturge with a complicated marital status, and Martha recklessly toys with the affections of both high-ranking Nazi and Soviet officials. The second daughter in the Weitz family to choose a gentile fiance, Sara discovers the anti-Semitism lurking in the hearts of complacent Germans, forcing her to rethink her marriage plans. All four women and their partners find themselves drawn into an underground espionage network—later dubbed the Rote Kapelle by the Nazis—gathering intelligence and connecting with communist cells seeking to destroy the Third Reich. But a single, careless radio transmission could cast everyone into the clutches of the enemy.
A riveting, complex tale of the courage of ordinary people.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-284110-0
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
This winter’s tale has something to melt each frozen heart.
Thrown together by a Brooklyn blizzard, two NYU professors and a Guatemalan nanny find themselves with a body to dispose of.
“Blessed with the stoic character of her people, accustomed as they are to earthquakes, floods, occasional tsunamis, and political cataclysm,” 61 year-old Chilean academic Lucia Maraz is nonetheless a bit freaked out by a snowstorm so severe that it's reported on television “in the solemn tone usually reserved for news about terrorism in far-off countries.” Her landlord and boss, the tightly wound Richard Bowmaster, lives right upstairs with his four cats, but he rebuffs her offer of soup and company. Too bad: she might have a crush on him. Enter Evelyn Ortega, a diminutive young woman from Guatemala Richard meets when he skids into her Lexus on the iced-over streets. Evelyn’s hysterical reaction to the fender bender seems crazily out of proportion when she shows up on his doorstep that night, and he has Lucia come up to help him understand why she’s so upset. The Lexus, it turns out, belongs to her volatile, violent employer…and there’s a corpse in the now-unlatchable trunk. Once Lucia gradually pieces together Evelyn’s story—she was smuggled north by a coyote after barely surviving gang violence that killed both of her siblings—the two professors decide to help her, and the plan they come up with is straight out of a telenovela. While that’s getting underway, Allende (The Japanese Lover, 2015, etc.) fills in the dark and complicated histories of Richard and Lucia, who also have suffered defining losses. The horrors of Evelyn’s past have left her all but mute; Richard is a complete nervous wreck; Lucia fears there is no greater love coming her way than that of her Chihuahua, Marcelo.
This winter’s tale has something to melt each frozen heart.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7813-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
We look forward to the movie.
During World War II, a scrappy Australian teenage runaway turns pampered bride, then Resistance agent and ruthless soldier in the French countryside.
“ ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t be like those other wives. The thought of hurting you is awful but so is the thought of letting those bastards win….’ Nancy twisted in her seat and hitched up her skirt so she could sit astride him. ‘Henry Fiocca, I fucking love you.’ ” In the less successful of two novels this year inspired by the amply decorated, famously high-spirited World War II heroine Nancy Wake (the other is Ariel Lawhon’s Code Name Hélène), the character emerges as a feisty foremother of Lisbeth Salander. While Wake’s liberal use of profanity is a historical fact, documented in her own autobiography and elsewhere, here it is deployed with anachronistic abandon. “Vagina, vagina, vagina,” shouts Nancy in her interview for a position with the British Strategic Operations Executive. “It’s a scien-fucking-tific term!” The facts of Wake’s war participation, working with the Resistance troops in the Auvergne, are dramatized in high-stakes scenes of battle, ambush, and betrayal. As in life, Nancy kills one man with her bare hands and others with a gun; she completes an epic bike ride that saves the day. But some aspects of this character’s behavior—her treatment of a gay radio operator comrade in arms (at first close friends, she later accuses him of “sticking [his] cock in every hole [he] can find”); her participation in a fireside blood ritual with a Resistance leader; other unpleasant interactions with the soldiers of the Maquis—seem to strike the wrong note. The first collaboration by American screenwriter Darby Kealey and British historical fiction author Imogen Robertson under the pseudonym Imogen Kealy, this novel is already being adapted into a feature film for Anne Hathaway.
We look forward to the movie.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3319-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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