Archives de catégorie : Historical Fiction

EMIL AND KARL de Yankev Glatshteyn

A unique work that was one of the first books for young readers describing the early days of what came to be known as the Holocaust.

EMIL AND KARL
by Yankev Glatshteyn
Square Fish/Macmillan, March 2008

Originally published before the war in 1938 and the full revelations of the Third Reich’s persecution of Jews and other civilians, the book offers a fascinating look at life during this period and the moral challenges people faced under Nazism. It is also a taut, gripping, page-turner of the first order. Written in the form of a suspense novel, Emil and Karl draws readers into the dilemma faced by two young boys in Vienna—one Jewish, the other not—when they suddenly find themselves without homes or families on the eve of World War II.

Originally written in Yiddish, Emil and Karl is one of the most accomplished works of children’s literature in this language, and the only book for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn, a major American Yiddish poet, novelist, and essayist.

“It’s a clear, powerful novel that will bring today’s readers very close to what it was like to be a child under Nazi occupation. . . The fast-moving prose is stark and immediate. . . The translation, sixty-five years after the novel’s original publication, is nothing short of haunting.” ―Booklist, Starred Review

Born in Lublin, Poland, Yankev Glatshteyn (1896-1971) was one of the major figures in the burgeoning Yiddish literary scene in New York City during the first half of the last century.
Jeffrey Shandler (translator) is an associate professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust and editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust, among other books. He lives in New York City.

THE USEFUL IDIOT de John Sweeney

Based on the terrifying and tragic true story of Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who first told the world about the famine in the Soviet Union in 1933

THE USEFUL IDIOT
by John Sweeney
Silvertail Books, January 2020

Moscow, 1932. Gareth Jones, a young Welsh reporter, arrives in the Soviet Union excited to see for himself how Josef Stalin is forging a new civilisation. He meets American and British journalists who acclaim Stalin’s great experiment—but when Jones witnesses people starving to death in Ukraine, his belief in the Soviet revolution is shattered. He must decide whether to report the truth or become just another useful idiot, saying only what the Communist secret police allow and smothering the evidence of his own eyes. In this special kind of hell, anyone could be an informer, and Jones knows his life will be at risk if he is even thought to be defying Stalin. And when the woman he loves falls under the suspicion of the secret police, everything Jones values is in danger. Can he reveal the terrible truth about the Ukrainian famine to the world, or will he be silenced forever?

THE USEFUL IDIOT is the secret history of the first great Soviet lie—wrapped up in an electrifying novel perfect for readers of Robert Harris, Ken Follett and Kate Atkinson. As Vladimir Putin rewrites the Nazi-Soviet pact and with the horrors of Chernobyl and the Cold War so recent, this thriller of fake news in 1932 is real storytelling of enormous significance.

John Sweeney is an award-winning journalist and a former long-serving BBC reporter. He is the author of ten books, including three novels: the 200,000-copy bestseller ELEPHANT MOON (Silvertail Books), another historical thriller based on true events, and two modern-day political thrillers, COLD and ROAD (Amazon Publishing). He also wrote an investigation into the Church of Scientology, THE CHURCH OF FEAR (Silvertail Books), and an account of his time spent undercover in North Korea, NORTH KOREA UNDERCOVER (Transworld).

Publication will coincide with the release on 14th February of Mr. Jones, a film telling the story of Gareth Jones by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, starring James Norton and Vanessa Kirby. It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. You can watch the trailer at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88Rz0ye5c-4

CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX de Jordy Rosenberg

A love story set in the eighteenth-century London of notorious thieves and queer subcultures, this genre-bending debut tells a profound story of gender, desire, and liberation

CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX
by Jordy Rosenberg
One World, June 2018

Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. Yet no one knows the true story; their confessions have never been found. Until now. Reeling from heartbreak, a scholar named Dr. Voth discovers a long-lost manuscript—a gender-defying exposé of Jack and Bess’s adventures. Dated 1724, the book depicts an London underworld where scamps and rogues clash with London’s newly established police force, queer subcultures thrive, and ominous threats of the Plague abound. Jack—a transgender carpenter’s apprentice—has fled his master’s house to become a legendary prison-break artist, and Bess has escaped the draining of the fenlands to become a revolutionary mastermind. CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX is, at once, a work of speculative historical fiction, a soaring love story, a puzzling mystery, an electrifying tale of adventure and suspense, and an unabashed celebration of sex and sexuality. Writing with the narrative mastery of Sarah Waters and the playful imagination of Nabokov, Jordy Rosenberg is an audacious storyteller of extraordinary talent.

Jordy Rosenberg is a transgender writer, scholar, and activist. He is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches eighteenth-century literature and queer/trans theory. He has received fellowships and awards from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation/J. Paul Getty Trust, the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the Clarion Foundation’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX is his first novel.

THE DRESSMAKER OF DACHAU de Mary Chamberlain aux enchères dans quatre pays !

Trois jours seulement après sa première soumission, THE DRESSMAKER OF DACHAU de Mary Chamberlain fait déjà l’objet d’enchères en Italie, aux Pays Bas et en Angleterre. Et aux Etats-Unis, quatre éditeurs de premier plan sont entrés dans la course !

THE DRESSMAKER OF DACHAU

by Mary Chamberlain

THE DRESSMAKER OF DACHAU is a literary historical fiction spanning 1939 to 1948 and following a young London seamstress who is hanged for murder in 1948. It’s beautifully evocative, intensely clever novel, which draws the reader in before pulling the rug from beneath their feet:

They had already weighed Ada and measured her. She was eight stone three pounds, and five feet six in stockinged feet.

She still had the slender figure of a mannequin.

She put on the thick, calico knickers with drawstrings, pulled them tight round her thighs and waist so nothing would leak. She knew that when they came off, there would be marks on her skin.

‘There’s a notebook,’ she said. ‘I kept a notebook. Everything’s in it.’

‘Are you ready?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’

Ada Vaughan is hanged in Holloway Prison in 1948, a prostitute and murderess, pilloried in the press as the ‘Dressmaker of Dachau’. But who was the woman behind the epithet? And what led her to her fate? Spanning 1939 to 1948 and taking us from the glamour of the Savoy to the desperation of Dachau, we watch a woman betrayed and abandoned, forced to survive on her wits alone, and in every way underserving of her punishment. Or was she?

In 1939 Ada is nothing more than an average young seamstress, from a normal home in London. But her life changes when she is swept off her feet by Stanislaus, an Austrian-Hungarian aristocrat. She elopes with him to France but when she falls pregnant he abandons her, leaving her to her fate as WWII breaks out. Forced to give up her child she is sent as a POW to Dachau where she begins to make clothes for the commandant’s wife, forever haunted by the fate of her son. On her return to London after the war she falls on desperate times and becomes a prostitute, where a chance meeting with a man she recognises from her past leads her on the steps towards the gallows.

Ada is an intensely compelling character. Is she an innocent young woman driven to a terrible crime? Or is she a liar and a fantasist, cold-blooded and calculating?

Mary Chamberlain is the author of popular and academic histories, and is Emeritus Professor of Caribbean History at Oxford Brookes University.