Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2018

Next book

CAFÉ BUDAPEST

A heart-rending, pellucid story of wartime survival.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2018

A Jewish refugee family arrives in 1939 Paris after a series of hairbreadth escapes in this sequel historical novel.

On the run from Nazis in Prague, the physically and psychologically traumatized Kohut family has arrived safely in the City of Light, just in time for France’s entry into World War II. In this follow-up to his semiautobiographical debut novel, The Dragontail Buttonhole (2016), Curtis picks up the story of Sophie and her husband, Willie, a displaced clothier, and their infant son, Pavel, exactly where the last installment left them. Sophie is traumatized but unbroken, young Pavel is hungry, and Willie faces the challenge of reuniting with his mother and father in England while dealing with “a crushed finger, a slashed chest and empty pockets.” Booted from their fleabag hotel by its Nazi-sympathizer owner, the Kohuts soon find that their mere presence in France is illegal: if they’re discovered, Sophie and Pavel will be sent to a refugee camp and Willie to prison. While in Paris, they survive on a couple of pawned gold coins and the occasional half-truth; in Germany, Willie had learned that “deception was an essential skill for refugees on the run.” As Sophie finds a surrogate family at the Café Budapest, Willy volunteers for France’s army of Czech exiles and does his best to contend with the “rough, vulgar camaraderie” of the ragtag recruits. Both main characters suffer unexpected joys and real dangers in their travails—including an especially sticky moment involving Pablo Picasso. The story becomes even more emotionally heightened and complex when Willy and Sophie learn of a particular man from their past in their midst. As in Curtis’ last novel, there’s a poignant and arresting precision in the descriptions that make events from 80 years in the past feel immediate: “Even the taxis-bicyclettes that carried two passengers with a child on their lap charged the equivalent of ten fresh eggs.” Indeed, there’s not a wasted word to be found in the smoothly paced text. Readers will also find themselves absorbed by the book’s gradually building suspense as the characters experience both good fortune and jeopardy.

A heart-rending, pellucid story of wartime survival.

Pub Date: April 2, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-9993631-2-6

Page Count: 444

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 50


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 50


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:
Next book

THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

Categories:
Close Quickview