A vivid cast and a good grasp of the period make for a gripping debut tale of deceit and chicanery in high places—and a...
British schoolmaster Stephen, author of 15 books on English literature and military history, recounts the bloody intrigues of Jacobean England as seen by a double agent.
An Englishman of the 16th or 17th century had to take care how he said his prayers, since the glimpse of a rosary or, alternately, of the Book of Common Prayer, could put him in irons, depending on who sat on the throne. A secret Catholic, Henry Gresham works as an agent for King James I’s virulently anti-papist Chief Secretary Robert Cecil. A rank opportunist, Cecil sees the Protestant cause as a means of consolidating support for the king against the Catholic powers of Spain and France, who have flooded the country with spies eager to stir up resentment among oppressed Catholics. Sympathetic to the Catholic cause, Gresham nevertheless recognizes the dangers posed by these Catholic provocateurs who play into Cecil’s hands by hatching plots against the Crown. While investigating Sir Francis Bacon’s sexual tastes for Cecil (sodomy was a capital offense, and Bacon had become a thorn in Cecil’s side), Gresham hears of a fantastic plot to blow up Parliament and install a Catholic on the throne. He proceeds cautiously and eventually discovers that the conspiracy centers on two rather shadowy figures: Guy Fawkes and Thomas Percy. Mercenaries both, Fawkes and Percy seem to be secret agents of Cecil, who is bent on fomenting a dramatic Catholic rebellion that he can “unmask” and quash at the last moment, thereby winning the favor of the king and the affections of the populace. Can Gresham (a Catholic posing as a Protestant) foil the plots of Fawkes and Percy (Protestants posing as Catholics) and thereby save the life of a Protestant king who alone can prevent a full-scale massacre of English Catholics?
A vivid cast and a good grasp of the period make for a gripping debut tale of deceit and chicanery in high places—and a reminder that some things never change.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30719-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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 phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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