Two sets of brothers and sisters negotiate the post–World War II London reconstruction boom.
Vincenzi’s latest investigation of British class unrest (Another Woman, 2012, etc.) begins with a country house. Entailed by a family trust, Summercourt cannot be sold by its owners, impoverished aristocrats Sarah and Adrian Fullerton-Clark. Son and heir Charles, a fledgling stockbroker, is in no position to help financially. With no repair budget, Summercourt is sliding into ruin. Sarah and Adrian pin their hopes on daughter Eliza’s marriage prospects—Jeremy, an ad exec worth a fortune, is smitten with her. Eliza, editor of a trendy style mag, finds her job all-absorbing as London fashion captivates the world, and bland Jeremy bores her. But she experiences immediate sexual frisson with Charles’ former army buddy Matt, a self-starting real-estate entrepreneur. An unplanned pregnancy forces the issue and the two are wed, much to Sarah’s chagrin over the groom’s working-class antecedents. Matt’s sister Scarlett, an airline hostess, has her own romantic troubles. Her lover, a married American, David, claims he’s about to divorce, but now his wife, Gaby, is pregnant. Scarlett, outraged because she had to abort her child by David, blackmails him into giving her seed money to start a travel business. While in Greece scouting a small hotel, she meets Mark Frost, a painfully shy travel writer with very appealing grey eyes. Eliza is chafing at the restrictions imposed on her by marriage and motherhood—Matt insists that she give up her job just as Twiggy and Carnaby Street are revolutionizing everything. Charles’ marriage to middle class upstart Juliet has proven disastrous—she’s spending all the money she erroneously (based on Summercourt) married him for, and he’s reduced to borrowing from her father. A few more developments, and the stage is set for the tamped-down hysteria that Vincenzi finesses so well. An intriguing glimpse at British life at the outset of the turbulent 1960s.
Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-52825-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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