Archives de catégorie : Historical Fiction

THE LITTLE LIAR de Mitch Albom

Beloved bestselling author Mitch Albom returns with a powerful novel that moves from a small village in Greece during the Holocaust, to America, where the intertwined lives of three survivors are forever changed by the perils of deception and the grace of redemption.

THE LITTLE LIAR
by Mitch Albom
Harper, November 2023
(via David Black Literary)

Credit: Jenny Risher

Eleven-year-old Nico Crispi never told a lie. When the Nazi’s invade his home in Salonika, Greece, the trustworthy boy is discovered by a German officer, who offers him a chance to save his family. All Nico has to do is convince his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading towards “the east” where they are promised jobs and safety. Unaware that this is all a cruel ruse, the innocent boy goes to the station platform every day and reassures the passengers that the journey is safe. But when the final train is at the station, Nico sees his family being loaded into a large boxcar crowded with other neighbors. Only after it is too late does Nico discover that he helped send the people he loved—and all the others—to their doom at Auschwitz.
Nico never tells the truth again.
In THE LITTLE LIAR, his first novel set during the Holocaust, Mitch Albom interweaves the stories of Nico, his brother Sebastian, and their schoolmate Fanni, who miraculously survive the death camps and spend years searching for Nico, who has become a pathological liar, and the Nazi officer who radically changed their lives. As the decades pass, Albom reveals the consequences of what they said, did, and endured.
A moving parable that explores honesty, survival, revenge and devotion, THE LITTLE LIAR is Mitch Albom at his very best. Narrated by the voice of Truth itself, it is a timeless story about the harm we inflict with our deceits, and the power of love to ultimately redeem us.

Mitch Albom is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, which have collectively sold more than forty million copies in forty-seven languages worldwide. He has written seven number-one New York Times bestsellers – including Tuesdays with Morrie, the bestselling memoir of all time, which topped the list for four straight years – award-winning TV films, stage plays, screenplays, a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and a musical. Through his work at the Detroit Free Press, he was inducted into both the National Sports Media Association and Michigan Sports halls of fame and is the recipient of the 2010 Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement. After bestselling memoir Finding Chika and “Human Touch,” the weekly serial written and published online in real-time to raise funds for pandemic relief, his latest work is a return to fiction with The Stranger in the Lifeboat (Harper, November 2021). He founded and oversees SAY Detroit, a consortium of nine different charitable operations in his hometown, including a nonprofit dessert shop and food product line to fund programs for Detroit’s most underserved citizens. He also operates an orphanage in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, which he visits monthly. He lives with his wife, Janine, in Michigan.

DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG d’Eve J. Chung

Told in assured, evocative prose, with impeccably drawn characters, DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG is a hopeful, powerful story about the resilience of women in war, the enduring love between mothers, daughters and sisters, and the sacrifices made to lift up future generations.

DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG
by Eve J. Chung
Berkley, Spring 2024
(via Writers House)

Daughters are the Ang’s family curse.
In 1948, the civil war ravages the countryside, but in rural Shandong the wealthy landowning Angs are more concerned with their lack of an heir. Hai is the eldest of four girls and spends her days looking after her baby sisters. Headstrong Di, who is just a year younger, learns to hide in plain sight, and their mother, abused by the family for failing to birth a boy, finds her own small acts of rebellion in the kitchen. As the communist army closes in on their town, the prosperous household flees, leaving behind the girls and their mother because they are useless mouths to feed.
Without an Ang male to punish, the land-seizing cadres choose Hai, as the eldest child, to stand trial for her family’s crimes. She barely survives their brutality. Realizing that worse is yet to come, the women plan their escape. Starving and penniless, but resourceful, they forge their travel permits and embark on a thousand-mile journey to confront the family that abandoned them.
From the countryside to Qingdao, and onward to British Hong Kong and eventually Taiwan, they witness the changing hands of a nation and the plight of multitudes caught in the wake of revolution. But with the loss of their home and the life they’d known also comes a new freedom to take hold of their own fate, to shake free of the bonds of their gender, and to claim their own story.

Eve J. Chung is a Taiwanese American human rights lawyer focusing on gender equality and women’s rights. She lives in New York with her husband, two children, and two dogs.

MADEMOISELLE EIFFEL UND DER TURM DER LIEBE de Sophie Villard

Opulent, emotional and irresistible: the inspirational story of Gustave Eiffel’s daughter.

MADEMOISELLE EIFFEL UND DER TURM DER LIEBE
(Mademoiselle Eiffel and the Tower of Love)
by Sophie Villard
Penguin Germany, April 2023

Paris, 1887. Gustave Eiffel wants to build the tallest tower in the world, yet no one seems to have faith that his absurd steel colossus will be finished in time for the World’s Fair – except, that is, for his bold daughter Claire. At a time when it is still thought unseemly for a woman to go for a walk on her own, she is her father’s most valued advisor. But Eiffel has to contend with more than deadlines. Paris’s cultural elite, led by Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas, think their city is being mutilated, and are taking a stand. Claire has her own worries too: her husband, young engineer Adolphe, is in charge of the high-risk construction of the tower’s top, and her fears for his safety are threatening to destroy their marriage. Then a worker is killed in a fall, and Claire meets handsome reporter Gordon Bennett, who promises her a carefree new life in America. Will she choose the Eiffel Tower, or a future in the New World?

Sophie Villard is the pen name of a successful German author. She studied journalism and political science, and lives near Dresden with her family. Her novel about the famous art collector Peggy Guggenheim was a Spiegel bestseller.

DANZIG de Hilke Sellnick

Love in a time of upheaval: the bestselling author’s captivating new saga set in Danzig.

DANZIG #1
by Hilke Sellnick
Penguin Germany, June 2023

Danzig, 1856. When young Johanna Berendt finds herself standing in front of the big villa in Langgasse Street, she feels deeply embarrassed. She eloped with a pianist just a few months ago, but now she’s back and hoping that her family will forgive her. Yet a shock awaits Johanna: her father has died, and her brother is now in charge of the family and their long-established merchant business. And he has no time for his freedom-loving sister.
When Berthold Forster, a good-natured and considerably older shipyard owner, proposes to Johanna, she seizes the opportunity to free herself from her brother’s sway. At Forster’s side, she even develops an interest in shipbuilding, and Georg, Forster’s son from his first marriage, is put out when she expresses a desire to help run the place. Yet Johanna is intelligent and courageous enough to pursue her vision, and Georg soon realises he has met his match – in business, of course. Or do his feelings run deeper?

Hilke Sellnick‘s bestselling historical novels have won her hundreds of thousands of fans over the years. With this first book in a brilliant new series for Penguin, she is now showing her readers a different side to herself. Set in nineteenth-century Danzig, it tells the addictive story of a young woman who defies social convention, turns an old shipyard into a successful business, and fights for love.

DIE VERWANDELTEN d’Ulrike Draesner

A moving mother-daughter novel stretching across a century of European history.

DIE VERWANDELTEN
(Penetrating Silence)
by Ulrike Draesner
Penguin Germany, February 2023

A model Nazi mother who teaches others how to raise their children while refusing to speak of the great loss she has suffered; a cook travelling across Germany in the summer of 1945 who would rather make love to women than to her employer; a lawyer and single mother who unexpectedly inherits a flat in Wrocław and discovers a hitherto unknown Polish branch of her family – these women are all bound together by a century of war and post-war life, flight, expulsion and violence.
How do you write about what happens to women in wartime – the way their voices are taken from them, the way they are changed for ever, and the hidden forces that keep them going? In DIE VERWANDELTEN, Ulrike Draesner gives these women their voices back as they reinvent themselves, change language and country, and discover within themselves an unsuspected wellspring of courage, humour and strength. A devastating novel – moving, unsettling, tender and perceptive.

Ulrike Draesner, born in 1962, is a lyricist, novelist and essayist. She studied English, German and philosophy in Munich and in Oxford and has worked as an academic, translator and editor. She has published poetry collections, short story collections, and seven novels, and held visiting professor or poetics lectureship posts at Kiel, Birmingham, Bamberg, Wiesbaden, Hildesheim, at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig, and at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel. She spent the academic years 2015-16 and 2016-2017 as a Visiting Fellow at New College, Oxford and at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. In 2018 Ulrike Draesner took up her post as a professor for German Literature and Creative Writing at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut Leipzig. Ulrike Draesner has received numerous awards for her work.