Although the many revelations in the final chapters sometimes stretch the otherwise tight plot, the author creates an...
In an intensely emotional story of love, loss and deception, a recently widowed woman reaches out to her late husband’s family in Tasmania and discovers she never really knew the man she married.
Newlyweds Eva and Jackson are visiting her mother along the English coast when Jackson slips out and goes fishing early one morning and drowns. Eva is devastated. She and Jackson, a native of Tasmania, met two years ago aboard a flight to London, and they were married eight months ago. She’s a midwife and he worked as a brand marketer for a drink company, and his love gave her a sense of completeness. Now Eva’s loss is so deep, she yearns to be near those who knew him best—his father, Dirk, his brother, and friends who grew up and worked with her husband. Flying to Tasmania, Eva first meets with Dirk, who spends much of his time in an alcoholic haze and doesn’t exactly embrace her presence. Although disappointed, Eva travels to Wattleboon Island, off the coast, to meet Saul, Jackson’s estranged brother. Once again, she gets the cold shoulder as Saul remains closemouthed about his brother and tries to hurry her off the island. When Eva has a sudden fainting spell, though, Saul ends up taking her to the local hospital and allows her to stay in a shack that belongs to his friend. She extends her visit to the area, suffers another devastating loss and finds herself becoming attracted to Saul. Through a fluke meeting, she also finally gets what she seeks—stories about her late husband’s life—but they’re not at all what she expects, and she discovers her husband’s deception is more pervasive than anyone realizes. Clarke (Swimming at Night, 2013) skillfully envelops readers in a delicate, romantic story tinged with intrigue and set in a breathtakingly exotic locale.
Although the many revelations in the final chapters sometimes stretch the otherwise tight plot, the author creates an entertaining narrative.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5015-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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