An admirably ambitious—sometimes to a fault—and beautifully told story of intersecting lives and histories.
Tomkins chronicles various connected lives across different timelines over the span of nearly 80 years in this sweeping novel.
In 1956, Charlotte Bradbury snaps photos at a London airport, trying to get a little “transcontinental glamour by osmosis…She has no ticket—at least not one that’s still valid.” A year earlier, Stanley Smith met the lovely Alice Mortimer at a carnival, managing to introduce himself and have a lovely interaction despite his stutter and asthma. In 2010, Michael Marston is enduring a grueling separation from his wife, who’s accused him of excessive drinking and is keeping him from his young son, Ethan. A writer who focuses on aviation, specifically on plane crashes and their excavations, Michael escapes his domestic dramas to travel to Iceland and work on his new book. He’s trying to solve an Icelandic wartime mystery by locating a plane that “vanished into thick air.” One year earlier, Montague Freeman lived in his late mother’s house near Heathrow, dealing with a longstanding fear of new people and reflecting on his father’s abandonment of the family; in one of the many dizzying loops through which the author starts connecting his various characters’ lives, that father is revealed to be none other than Geoffrey Freeman, an aviation consultant who knows Michael well and who was once photographed at the same airport by Charlotte Bradbury. Tomkins then introduces readers to Frank and James Carter, a father and son also unknowingly photographed by Charlotte in 1956, shortly before they boarded a flight to Scotland and flew into a storm that would have rippling effects far into the future.
As those effects are slowly fleshed out in each storyline, Tomkins delves deeply into a wide cast of supporting characters and rich subplots. Charlotte remains a consistent standout throughout, and the author features her in some of his most striking passages. As a former wartime nurse, her tales are filled with harrowing moments, like the extraordinarily rendered bombing of a hospital: “Did she hear the outside world, or her own damaged eardrums? Walls continued to collapse, ceilings to cave in.” Charlotte’s heartbreak is beautifully conveyed as she yearns for the lost love of her life, Viktor: “pain also compacts, taut and compressed; calcifying, ossifying, petrifying. It thins, but in doing so, hardens to dense granite.” As poetic and beautiful as Tomkins’ prose is throughout, several storylines, such as Montague’s emotional struggles or the dissolution of Michael’s marriage, feel superfluous, overlong, and too busy with detail, often bringing the story back down to earth. The connections across space and time are what really spark and make the novel fly, such as the jarring juxtaposition of a worn-down contemporary airline terminal against its jet-set promise of the 1950s. (“Decades ago, this represented the future. Modernist brick and brutal cement, the concrete planters, full of greenery and life; the planters now gone, the shiny pointed cement now dull, and the brickwork heavy with mottles and the unsightly efflorescence of ageing, like liver spots for building materials.”)
Pub Date: March 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798883548054
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
