Melissa Brown

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Yellow Bird Sings

Review by Melissa Brown

“The world ceased to make sense,” writes Jennifer Rosner in her debut novel, The Yellow Bird Sings. Nothing about Poland in 1941 follows any familiar pattern for Róza and her young daughter, Shira, as they flee their hometown after Nazis invade. 

Rosner’s novel takes us to the barn where Henryk and Krystyna, who fear for their own family’s safety if caught harboring Jews, allow the mother and daughter to hide. Róza’s fears compound with each interminable day of their confinement, especially as it grows harder for curious, clever Shira not to indulge her love of music. Róza has told Shira little about why they had to leave, why they have to hide and be quiet, and Shira brims with questions and yearns to be outside. To occupy and distract her daughter, Róza invents a tale of a girl in a hidden flower garden with a virtuoso yellow bird who can sing songs—unless the giants are nearby. Music lifts them as Róza teaches Shira the pieces she and her violinist husband loved, and unexpectedly her daughter’s brilliant proficiency reveals itself. The melodies inside Shira burn to be expressed, and it pains Róza to stifle her daughter’s gift to keep them safe. 

In Shira and Róza, Rosner captures two souls in turmoil, chronicling their grief as well as their strength of will to overcome, their longings and even surprising triumphs. Through the language of music and memory, Rosner thoughtfully composes a life for Róza and Shira that is safe and beautiful until it is shattered. 

The Yellow Bird Sings keeps your heart in your throat, your eyes pricked with tears. Rosner excels at illustrating the nostalgic pull of a certain melody, a scrap of blanket, the smell of a loved one, a recipe with eggs. When their shelter is threatened, Róza and Shira must fly, as birds do, with only the bond of their hearts to connect them. 

The little light that shines in this terrible darkness—the precious little hope that anchors Róza’s and Shira’s souls—is very bright.

The little light that shines in this terrible darkness—the precious little hope that anchors Róza’s and Shira’s souls—is very bright.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Illness Lesson

Review by Melissa Brown

In the verdant Massachusetts countryside, the latest of Samuel Hood’s grand philosophical experiments at Birch Hill is underway. It’s 1871, and a school for the true instruction of girls—“the training of intellects and souls, hearts and minds”—is a novel undertaking. Intending to give young ladies more to do than embroider and play the piano, Samuel sets out to redeem his first failed intellectual endeavor that took place at the farm.

From the outset of Clare Beams’ first novel, The Illness Lesson, hubris clouds Samuel’s judgment. He believes he’s been chosen by God for this transformative work and that his efforts are validated by the surprising return of arresting, brilliantly red birds called trilling hearts. He desires to teach girls—but really to form them in his image, as he’s done with his daughter, Caroline, who reluctantly becomes the only female teacher in the school.

Eight girls arrive and begin their studies, and Beams poetically chronicles their experiences. The reader’s gaze is Caroline’s; we experience with her a growing unease at what begins unfolding at the school. Her father’s grand, even laudable, dream slowly proves disastrous in execution. Before long, the teenage girls are beset by maladies—fainting, red welts and rashes, strange lack of bodily control—and the doctor who is brought in, Hawkins, diagnoses hysteria. It’s a catch-all label, as the insidious Hawkins himself admits, whose “treatment” is as transgressive as they come. Questions of parental consent are swiftly discarded as the doctor goes about his intrusive plans. Resistant but ultimately compliant, Caroline finds even herself swept up in Hawkins’ machinations. Neither her father nor the other male teacher intervenes.

Beams powerfully explores the nature of susceptibility, manipulation and authority, as well as the strength of the female mind and body. The author’s prose is flowing if occasionally florid, but the style suits the historic setting.

Caroline’s father wants to shape girls’ minds and souls, but eventually the girls—and Caroline—are set free to fly. At a crucial turning point, Beams poignantly writes that “with a survivable body, a person could do anything she wanted,” which becomes a fitting anthem.

Clare Beams powerfully explores the nature of susceptibility, manipulation and authority, as well as the strength of the feminine mind and body.
FictionWorld Fiction

The Beekeeper of Aleppo

Review by Melissa Brown

Like the beehives he tends, Nuri Ibrahim exists at the mercy of forces larger than he. When war encroaches on him and his wife, Afra, they are forced to leave their lives in Syria behind and become refugees. 

Entrusting themselves to strangers, they journey toward England, where Nuri’s cousin Mustafa waits with his family, but it takes a long time to reunite with Mustafa. Bridging the distance between husband and wife, a rift forged by profound loss, will take just as long. The war has blinded them both: Afra has lost her sight, and Nuri often sees only what he wants to see.

In The Beekeeper of Aleppo, author Christy Lefteri draws from her experiences volunteering with refugees in Athens, Greece, to build a moving examination of how people make sense of who they were and who they have become. Through Syria, Turkey and Greece, Afra and Nuri move and wait while the pull of the past, both its dark tragedy and its former sunlit joy, travels with them. 

Hope is a thread Nuri loses, picks up and loses again. But no matter how bleak the present in which they find themselves, hope surfaces when it is most needed—in dreams, in visions, in emails, in an injured bee, in the blue sky, in memory. Not all memories are shadows; some are full of light.

Lefteri’s writing is observant and fluid, capturing the contours of life and relationships. The degradation Nuri and Afra must bear made me want to look away, but Lefteri’s thoughtful voice always brought me back. In defiance of all they have witnessed and endured, Nuri, Afra and Mustafa struggle mightily to be “people who bring life rather than death.” 

Like the beehives he tends, Nuri Ibrahim exists at the mercy of forces larger than he. When war encroaches on him and his wife, Afra, they are forced to leave their lives in Syria behind and become refugees. 

Entrusting themselves to strangers, they journey toward…

FictionLiterary Fiction

The Gone Dead

Review by Melissa Brown

A father dies mysteriously, and his daughter, too young to remember what she saw—if she saw anything—is whisked away. It takes another death to bring Billie James back to Greendale, Mississippi, when her late grandmother leaves her a dog, some money and the house where her father died.

Billie’s parents—Pia, a wispy blonde who later becomes a medieval studies scholar, and Cliff, a tall, black budding poet and activist—met on a Freedom Riders bus, but their bond didn’t last. In the Delta in the 1960s, interracial relationships were frowned upon. When Cliff died in 1972 while 4-year-old Billie was visiting him, Pia came for her, and they moved on. At the start of The Gone Dead, it’s 2003, and Billie has returned to the “contradictory spell of the South,” a place she barely remembers. Billie finds a sense of purpose by traveling back roads to old haunts and showing up on the doorsteps of those her father knew. Finding out how her father died (by his hand or another’s) becomes her focus, though the divide between white and black, wealthy and poor—still as stark and confounding as ever—frustrates her search.

With an actor’s ear for dialogue and a directorial vision, Chanelle Benz creates characters and scenes like a playwright. Her debut novel skillfully reveals and also conceals, building tension within her characters and between the past and the present that is left largely unresolved. Chapter by chapter, each told from a different perspective, The Gone Dead spreads out like the Mississippi River’s many tributaries, showing how one person’s life affects others, even long after death. Most of the people Billie meets—Mr. McGee, the original landowner’s son who was there the night her father died; Carlotta, one of her dad’s many girlfriends; and her Uncle Dee, who lives in a former motel and drives a truck as far away from Greendale as he can only to come back—know something they aren’t telling her. This complicated place and people that molded Cliff James and gave weight to his poetry is the same place and people that became his undoing.

Benz’s poetic words capture the weariness of a South still mired in old prejudices and transgressions but longing for freedom and redemption.

The Gone Dead spreads out like the Mississippi River’s many tributaries, showing how one person’s life affects others, even long after death.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Long Flight

Review by Melissa Brown

Bigger isn’t always better or more effective. The small, unassuming body of a pigeon carrying coded messages behind enemy lines, avoiding capture, detection or death by falcon, can end up wreaking as much havoc as a bomb. In The Long Flight Home, Alan Hlad tells a dramatic, fictionalized story about the real use of pigeons during World War II. British intelligence hoped that the pigeons, dropped by the thousands into Nazi-occupied France, would be found by resistance fighters and used to return messages containing vital reconnaissance.

Long before the United States enters the fight, Oliver “Ollie” Evans from Maine smuggles himself into Britain with dreams of a different kind of flying. Before he can join the Royal Air Force, he is obligated to help Bertie Shepherd and his granddaughter, Susan, with their role in a top-secret pigeon mission. Unsurprisingly, Ollie and Susan’s proximity leads to romance, and when Ollie gets stranded in France, the coded messages contain more than just German troop movements. Hoping to return to Susan, Ollie tries to assist the resistance effort until he can escape, while Susan awaits messages from him, carried by her remarkable pet pigeon Duchess, who accidentally got conscripted with the trained birds.

In his debut novel, Hlad tells a compelling if somewhat predictable story. The engaging plot and fascinating details of the National Pigeon Service make it a rewarding read. Many civilian pigeon-keepers volunteered to try to turn the tide of the war, not knowing if it would work or be worth the loss of their birds in the dangerous process. The Long Flight Home captures the contributions of the average citizens who, in a time of peril, rose to meet the challenge in heroic ways.

Bigger isn’t always better or more effective. The small, unassuming body of a pigeon carrying coded messages behind enemy lines, avoiding capture, detection or death by falcon, can end up wreaking as much havoc as a bomb. In The Long Flight Home, Alan Hlad tells a dramatic, fictionalized story about the real use of pigeons during World War II. British intelligence hoped that the pigeons, dropped by the thousands into Nazi-occupied France, would be found by resistance fighters and used to return messages containing vital reconnaissance.

FictionWorld Fiction

Walking on the Ceiling

Review by Melissa Brown

The stories we construct about ourselves and others are only one way of looking at things. Ayşegül Savaş’ young female protagonist in Walking on the Ceiling tells herself this truth as she sets out to piece together her own story.

With its innately self-conscious approach, Savaş’ first novel reads much like a diary. Nurunisa tries to understand her life by making an inventory of many pivotal events, mostly recalling her friendship with a writer she calls M. They met in Paris at a reading of one of his books and walked the city streets together talking of Istanbul. She, a daughter of Turkey, and he, an admirer of her historic birthplace, connect over memories. These walks with M are many things: two foreigners bonding over a shared city; a writer looking for his next muse; a retracing of familiar steps to find what was lost or uncover something new. Nurunisa wades through these recollections alongside memories of her youth, her time in London at university and stories of her mother and father, parsing her life for significance. Her father and mother are ghosts now, hazy at the edges and insubstantial. They anchor her no more. Yet her memories of them provide the richest material in the novel, and the reader may wish Savaş would spend more time mining those relationships. The writer M is purposefully enigmatic, which intrigues but leaves a feeling of incompletion at the same time.

Throughout, Savaş writes sensitively, and personal revelations fill the pages of Walking on the Ceiling. Sentences sometimes read like an elegy not just for the city but for Nurunisa’s past as well: “Istanbul was once an innocent place, with all its trustworthy names.” The poetic quality of the author’s prose draws you in, even if the self-reflection can feel burdensome at times. The novel’s short chapters string together carefully drawn vignettes that enhance the diaristic feel of her story. Nurunisa’s thoughts and memories threaten to spill over into full understanding but never quite do; she keeps them contained, much like how she herself is still hemmed in by the past.

As a child, Nurunisa would hold a small mirror to the ceiling and discovered a hidden white city there. In Walking on the Ceiling, she’s does the same thing with her own history, twisting and turning it to see what depths of meaning she can uncover from different angles.

The stories we construct about ourselves and others are only one way of looking at things. Ayşegül Savaş’ young female protagonist in Walking on the Ceiling tells herself this truth as she sets out to piece together her own story.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

Review by Melissa Brown

In 1968, the town of Hometown, Australia, is perplexed by Hannah Babel and her survival of Auschwitz, her Jewishness and her books. Tom Hope finds her especially entrancing. Tom’s wife, Trudy, has left him and taken her son, Peter, a boy who is not Tom’s biological child but is in every sense beloved as his own.

Tom, a farmer and tradesman, is smitten with Hannah and also a bit confused by her. This erudite Hungarian woman keeps a pet bird named David and wants to open a bookshop in the less-than-bibliophilic Hometown. Her goal—to sell 25,000 books, the same number of books burned by German students in Berlin in 1933—defines her as potentially mad but also enthralling.

Tom and Hannah find the spark of redemption in each other. Their individual suffering draws them together, yet interrupts their intimacy. The horror of Auschwitz is not something Tom understands; those horrifying events occurred a world away from his life in Australia. Hannah doesn’t want to burden him either, so as their connection grows, she must face the vows she made not to be a wife or mother again.

In The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, Robert Hillman’s observations are astute and thoughtful as he captures the slightest mood shift and nuance of personality. The inner workings of his finely tuned and memorable characters come to life in his open, honest style of writing. In particular, Hannah’s voice carries both the sorrow of the tragedies she’s lived through and a childlike glee when she finds something marvelous. Her pursuit of beauty—despite it all—inspires.

“God lets us love,” a character observes late in the novel. The broken hearted can be healed. Fractures, even of the heart, can be set. As it says in the book of Joel in the Old Testament, the years the locusts have eaten can be restored.

In The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, Robert Hillman’s observances are astute and thoughtful as he captures the slightest mood shift and nuance of personality. The inner workings of his finely tuned and memorable characters come to life in his open, honest style of writing.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Bangkok Wakes to Rain

Review by Melissa Brown

Krungthep, Bangkok, New Krungthep—the Thai capital city goes by many names and assumes many, ever-changing facades in Bangkok Wakes to Rain. Past and future intermingle like the waters that converge in the Chao Phraya river running through the heart of the city. 

Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s first novel ranges wide in time and scope, and the author masterfully captures dozens of different voices and thoughts in his vast cast: the vagabond photographer who avoids returning to his ancestral home; a 19th-century missionary doctor who wants nothing more than a transfer to another posting when he first arrives in Siam; studious young swimmer Mai who achieves success in business that is the stuff of sci-fi dreams; a wandering jazz pianist who goes by “Crazy Legs” and plays for hours in the nightclubs; sisters Nee and Nok, who find themselves forever affected by the student political protests of the 1970s. Teenage girls obsessed with their looks grow into mothers, spouses cheat, parents age and die, and sons and daughters are born. 

This ambitious novel’s many overlapping stories chart a fast pace, and at times, the connective thread between them gets muddled. Sudbanthad’s narrative flits around and back and forth, much like the colorful parrots that inhabit the old colonial house at the epicenter of the novel and, later, the animatronic birds used to scan the infrastructure of the city in a technologically advanced future. The lives of the people who call, or once called, Krungthep home are inextricably tied to this place.

In this city prone to flooding, rain is a constant, continually washing away what once was. And yet, in the words of a mother, “truth lingers, unseen like phantoms but there to rattle and scream wherever people try hardest to forget.”

Krungthep, Bangkok, New Krungthep—the Thai capital city goes by many names and assumes many, ever-changing facades in Bangkok Wakes to Rain. Past and future intermingle like the waters that converge in the Chao Phraya river running through the heart of the city. 

FictionHistorical Fiction

Bowlaway

Review by Melissa Brown

BookPage starred review, February 2019

To tell a good tale, you need drama—and in this area, Bowlaway spares no expense. A turn-of-the-20th-century candlepin bowling alley works its way into people’s lives and under their skin in Elizabeth McCracken’s sixth book. 

After she seems to materialize in a cemetery in Salford, Massachusetts, Bertha Truitt opens Truitt’s Alleys (later rechristened Bowlaway), which takes on a life as mysterious as her own. Bertha’s oddities are numerous: bicycling in a split skirt, building an octagonal house named Superba high on a hill, marrying a black doctor named Leviticus Sprague and then letting women bowl in full view of spectators. The whole being of Bertha scandalizes and perplexes. When Bertha is struck down in a bewildering accident that evokes (for this reader, anyhow) a scene from the fantastic but short-lived sitcom “Pushing Daisies,” her death sets the lives of those in her orbit spinning.

“Our subject is love because our subject is bowling,” McCracken’s narrator opines early in the novel. The love in Bowlaway takes many forms: love of a spouse, love of a child, love of self and love of a capricious game. People love the alleys; they hate the alleys; they keep coming back to the alleys. Bowlaway forms the linchpin in the lives of an eccentric cast, from Bertha’s disconsolate widower to Joe Wear, the young watchman who first found Bertha in the cemetery. Joe becomes manager before an unexplained disappearance, but his fate is intertwined with Bertha’s and the bowling alley, no matter how long he stays away from the lanes.

In Bowlaway, McCracken’s prose is well-tooled, hilarious and tender, thoughtful and jocular. Her characters inhabit their world so completely, so bodily, that they could’ve truly existed. Her detailed observations make the bizarre seem plausible, and always enjoyable.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A turn-of-the-20th-century candlepin bowling alley works its way into people’s lives and under their skin in Elizabeth McCracken’s sixth book.
FictionPopular Fiction

Unmarriageable

Review by Melissa Brown

If marriage is the prize, you’d better be skilled in the art of “grabbing it,” it being an eligible bachelor. In her Pride and Prejudice adaptation, Soniah Kamal transports Jane Austen’s narrative to early-2000s Pakistan, imbuing the often-reimagined story with a fresh lexicon. Unmarriageable proves the timelessness of Austen and how her centuries-old plotline finds a home in many cultures.

The Binat family has fallen far, deceived out of their fortunes by Mr. Binat’s own brother, and have been making due with reduced circumstances for more than a decade. To Mrs. Binat’s chagrin, her two oldest daughters must work, finding employment as teachers at the local school. All five Binat girls—Jena, Alys, Mari, Qitty and Lady—await their (mother’s) longed-for fate of a good marriage.

Though her prose lacks Austen’s sardonic bite and subtlety, Kamal paints endearing relationships between Jena and Alys, and between Alys and her best friend, Sherry Looclus. Due to the lack of well-developed chemistry, love matches between Alys and Valentine Darsee, and Jena and Fahad “Bungles” Bingla, unfortunately fall flat, but the real spark to Kamal’s writing comes whenever Mrs. Binat opens her mouth. The mother’s hysterics over appearances and the father’s frequent retreat to his garden (plants can’t talk, after all) provide much of the comic relief. Kamal skewers Pakistani society over their obsessions and hypocrisies much in the same way Austen did hers. Alys, told at one point by the condescending Beena dey Bagh that it must be hard for her mother to have two 30-year-old daughters unmarried, retorts that it “seems to be even harder on absolute strangers.”

As an admirer of Austen’s work, I appreciate how others want to emulate her. It is a truth universally acknowledged, however, that it is quite the undertaking. Altogether, Unmarriageable is light and entertaining. Meddling mothers, conniving sisters, arrogant men and a marriage-minded society provide plenty of fodder, and in the end, class clashes and societal expectations transcend the ages as well as geography.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If marriage is the prize, you’d better be skilled in the art of “grabbing it,” it being an eligible bachelor. In her Pride and Prejudice adaptation, Soniah Kamal transports Jane Austen’s narrative to early-2000s Pakistan, imbuing the often-reimagined story with a fresh lexicon. Unmarriageable proves the timelessness of Austen and how her centuries-old plotline finds a home in many cultures.

FictionHistorical FictionComing of Age

The Kinship of Secrets

Review by Melissa Brown

A family separated by war and difficult choices maintains an unwavering bond in Eugenia Kim’s thoughtful second novel. Picking up where The Calligrapher’s Daughter ends, The Kinship of Secrets finds Calvin and Najin Cho settled in America with their daughter, Miran, while their younger daughter, Inja, remains in the care of Najin’s extended family in South Korea. The first harrowing glimpses of the Korean War extend their separation longer than expected, causing unimaginable physical hardship on one side and painful emotional turmoil on the other. Najin’s hope to reunite her family is met with disappointment after disappointment as the months turn into years and then decades.

Oceans apart, Inja and Miran grow up, and though their respective lives are dissimilar, their individual desires mirror each other’s. Najin may be physically present in Miran’s life, but she’s also emotionally removed and consumed with worry for Inja. Inja, who was only an infant when her parents and Miran left for America, has no lasting memories of Najin but yearns to know her. When long-kept family secrets are finally revealed, the truth enables both Miran and Inja to connect with each other and with their mother. The sisters mature, morphing into opinionated teenagers and college students, eventually becoming independent young women molded by key events of the 1960s and ’70s.

Covering such a broad span of history is an ambitious undertaking, and The Kinship of Secrets is not without its stumbles. While at times the author’s prose tells more overtly than it shows, she’s able to capture an abundance of feeling. Drawn from her own family history, Kim’s story unfolds with the weight of lived experience.

Through these relationships, The Kinship of Secrets explores the meaning of love and sacrifice and how often they are one and the same.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A family separated by war and difficult choices maintains an unwavering bond in Eugenia Kim’s thoughtful second novel. Picking up where The Calligrapher’s Daughter ends, The Kinship of Secrets finds Calvin and Najin Cho settled in America with their daughter, Miran, while their younger daughter, Inja, remains in the care of Najin’s extended family in South Korea.

FictionHistorical Fiction

News of Our Loved Ones

Review by Melissa Brown

War “is all failed plans and improvising,” muses a character in Abigail DeWitt’s third novel, News of Our Loved Ones. Though liberating, D-Day brings the worst horror upon the Delasalle family, as a bomb destroys the family’s home in Caen and splinters the survivors’ lives. For 18-year-old Geneviève Delasalle, this is a seminal moment to which she returns throughout her life, and years later, it fuels the stories that enthrall her boisterous American children, especially her daughter Polly. For Geneviève’s extended family in France, it is a constant presence, even as decades pass.

Set primarily during events surrounding World War II, News of Our Loved Ones functions less as a cohesive, plot-driven narrative and more like a collection of short stories, a string of vignettes or character studies. The chapters, some of which were published previously on their own, feel a bit truncated, and often a strong narrative thread is obscured by this abruptness. Still, DeWitt is ambitious with her latest novel, told from several perspectives through time, ranging across France to America and back again. The lives of her characters intertwine in a widening maze of infidelity, loss and secrecy, as the war links generations together as much as it tears those bonds apart.

While the shifts in time and point of view could have been more deftly handled, DeWitt’s strengths lie in keen emotional observation and the portrayal of her characters’ inner turmoil. DeWitt poetically illuminates her characters’ lives, weaving in and out like a knitting needle through wool.

War “is all failed plans and improvising,” muses a character in Abigail DeWitt’s third novel, News of Our Loved Ones. Though liberating, D-Day brings the worst horror upon the Delasalle family, as a bomb destroys the family’s home in Caen and splinters the survivors’ lives. For 18-year-old Geneviève Delasalle, this is a seminal moment to which she returns throughout her life, and years later, it fuels the stories that enthrall her boisterous American children, especially her daughter Polly. For Geneviève’s extended family in France, it is a constant presence, even as decades pass.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Love in desperate times

Review by Melissa Brown

Time marches on, taking with it alliances and allegiances both political and personal. With a physician’s precision and an artist’s eye, author Daniel Mason (The Piano Tuner) captures the emotional and physical upheaval wrought by war. Right from the start, his new novel, The Winter Soldier, thrums with tension, whisking the reader into the fray.

Amid the disorientation and displacement of World War I, Lucius, a barely trained young medical student, reports to a remote church requisitioned as a field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains. There, he meets the enigmatic Sister Margarete, a nurse who has been the main medical provider with a few orderlies since the previous doctors deserted or died along with her fellow sisters. Quick, witty and knowledgeable, Margarete becomes Lucius’ teacher, while a more than collegial relationship stirs beneath the surface.

As the front advances around them, churning out the wounded, Lucius and Margarete toil side by side in their “patch and send” hospital. Amputations, nervous shock, skulls caved in, typhus, rats and lice—it’s exhausting to imagine the onslaught of it all, but Mason deftly renders every scene in vivid detail. Winter’s inevitable descent looms over them constantly, ready to take the lives they struggle to save. Yet even in winter, to paraphrase Camus, an invincible summer lies within. Hope, love, desire, laughter, even beauty exist alongside the blood and mayhem.

The arrival of a wrecked shell of a soldier, trapped in both body and mind, brings a reckoning. Choices made by both nurse and doctor shape the young soldier’s life for good and for ill, reverberating until the novel’s final page. Through Vienna, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Galicia, The Winter Soldier roams from battlefields and hospitals to villages and ballrooms, never losing the thread between Lucius and Margarete.

With striking prose and an unencumbered pace, The Winter Soldier makes for a uniquely compelling read.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Time marches on, taking with it alliances and allegiances both political and personal. With a physician’s precision and an artist’s eye, author Daniel Mason (The Piano Tuner) captures the emotional and physical upheaval wrought by war. Right from the start, his new novel, The Winter Soldier, thrums with tension, whisking the reader into the fray.

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