BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, April 2017

What was Germany like for regular citizens in the months and years after World War II? In the enthralling The Women in the Castle, Jessica Shattuck paints a portrait of a postwar country wracked with guilt and confusion, trying to regroup and rebuild even as Allied forces require Germans to watch footage of the liberation of Buchenwald and paper villages with photos of concentration camp victims. In this uncertain world, where many Germans still believe these actions to be propaganda and don’t yet understand the full horror of what has transpired, three women come together through unlikely connections.

Marianne von Lingenfels is an aristocrat whose husband died due to his involvement in an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life. Before he dies, Marianne pledges to take care of the wives and children of other resisters. Making good on that promise, Marianne retrieves Benita, who is being abused by Russian soldiers in Berlin, and locates Benita’s son, who’s being held in a Nazi children’s home.

The group makes its way to the von Lingenfels’ castle, where Marianne’s children also live. Then quiet Ania and her two shell-shocked boys arrive, ostensibly fleeing the Red Army. But there’s more to her story, and Benita’s, and it will take years for Marianne to fully understand the pasts of the women she’s been charged with protecting.

Shattuck, whose novel The Hazards of Good Breeding was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, sheds new light on World War II’s aftermath and the families left behind, and raises poignant questions about blind loyalty: “Could you see a person’s soul in their face? Marianne and Albrecht had often argued about this. Yes, she had insisted. Didn’t you know from the moment you saw Hitler’s photograph that he was bad? Albrecht wasn’t sure. If it was so obvious, he pointed out, how did he fool the rest of Germany?”

The Women in the Castle is haunting, a beautifully written and painfully vivid glimpse into one of the most horrific times in world history.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Paul La Farge has always drawn the thinnest and most permeable line between biographical fact and historical fiction. Both in his previous novels and in a set of poetic dreams he “translated” from a non-existent French poet of the 19th century, La Farge illuminates over and over again the superior strangeness of “real life” over anything he brilliantly devises as a writer of boundless imagination.

Now the author has surpassed himself. The Night Ocean is the ultimate crossing of the hazy boundary between reality and fantasy. It unflinchingly and comically diagnoses the emotional wonder and chaos unleashed by any troubled writer who fabricates an evil reality all his own. H.P. Lovecraft was such a person, and this novel is a mighty boon to horror geeks like me who misspent a good portion of our youths reading the pulp fiction of Lovecraft and his unholy minions, and surrendering to the cult of “fandom” that grew up around his bizarre personality and cosmically evil inventions. But La Farge’s novel goes further than celebrating the legacy of this especially deranged and popular storyteller. It is told by a psychotherapist, whose husband’s career and sanity have been destroyed by Lovecraft & Co. For this devastated couple, there are dark boxes within Lovecraft’s dark boxes, forcing a delightfully unsteady movement of the novel toward two associated characters: Lovecraft’s friend (and possible lover) Robert Barlow, who is a richly historical figure, and L.C. Spinks, an entirely unreal figure who becomes diabolically “real” to us, as the novel unfolds layer upon layer of Spinks’ truths and untruths, heartbreaking facts and wild fabrications.

Best of all is the way The Night Ocean addresses the real horror of H.P. Lovecraft’s vile hatefulness against African-Americans, Jews and other minorities. As in Matt Ruff’s recent novel Lovecraft Country (which I also recommend), Lovecraft’s demons are nothing more or less than us.

Lies, corruption, treachery, lust, infidelity, greed—all the elements present in Sarah Dunant’s bestselling novels set in the tumultuous years of the Italian Renaissance are somehow magnified in her latest, the continuation of her astute dissection of the lives of the Borgia family, which she began with 2014’s Blood and Beauty.

It’s the winter of 1501-1502 when In the Name of the Family opens: Rodrigo Borgia is firmly ensconced in the Vatican as Pope Alexander VI, who openly “uses his illegitimate children as weapons to carve a new dynastic block of power.” Cesare, his eldest son, is systematically directing his army of mercenaries in their march northward as they overtake the small city-states of Tuscany, breaking long-standing alliances and killing at will those he once supported. His sister Lucrezia is traveling north to Ferrara to marry Alfonso d’Este, the son of the Duke of Ferrara—a marriage forged merely to solidify Borgia dominance in Tuscany, where Cesare’s ultimate goal is the acquisition of Florence itself.

Characters surrounding this Borgia triumvirate include Niccolò Machiavelli, who is appointed Undersecretary to Florence’s Council, and serves as envoy to Rome. He’s portrayed by Dunant as a thoughtful observer of the political maneuvers made by Cesare and the pope—observations thought to lead to his signature work, The Prince, completed in 1513 after both of his subjects have died. Machiavelli is witness to many of Cesare’s “thuggish acts,” but also perceives his virtue, “that shimmering slippery work that mixes strength, vitality and skill in equal measures.”

Lucrezia, too, is given sympathetic treatment by Dunant, who focuses on her manipulation by her father and brother, leading to three arranged marriages by the time she turns 22. The pressure on her to bear male heirs is a constant source of worry, complicated by the ever-present threat of disease and the dangers of childbirth.

Dunant’s meticulously researched portrayal of these iconic characters and the violent, conspiracy-filled times in which they lived is a captivating piece of historical fiction. Both entertaining and enlightening, it’s sure to be welcomed by her many readers.

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Some works of art are so iconic that the viewer can’t help but wonder about the backstory. Take, for example, “Christina’s World,” painted by Andrew Wyeth in 1948 and inspired by a woman named Christina Olson. The painting shows a young woman with her back to the viewer, lying in a vast field and looking up at a ­weather-beaten house and its smaller outbuildings. Though we can’t see her face, we get the impression that she’s yearning for something.

Christina Baker Kline’s superb new novel chronicles the constricted life of the woman Wyeth made famous. The Christina in Kline’s book used to yearn for things, but poverty and disability made her aware early on that some of the pleasures of life were not to be hers. We first meet her as a young child, on her sickbed. Yet, despite her challenges, the young Christina is smart, stubborn, resourceful and even physically brave. But bad luck, bad timing, other people’s bad decisions or bad faith shrink her life down to the old house and the plot of land it stands on. Alone in the house with her younger brother, her life is year after year of drudgery. Then Wyeth shows up and takes one of her upstairs rooms as a studio.

In case you’re wondering, no, Wyeth and Christina don’t fall in love and run away together. Wyeth’s most famous painting is deceptive; the real Christina was old enough to be his mother. What is forged between them is a tender connection and understanding.

The beauty of Kline’s writing and her grasp of her characters is such that at first you want to sink into this book like a warm bath. But she doesn’t allow her reader to get too comfortable. Christina is not a woman who accepts her disappointments with saintly forbearance. She is bitter, disappointed and occasionally spiteful. But the good-natured and talented young painter does not pity her—he sees her humanity.

Gentle and profound, A Piece of the World shows the healing power of simple, unexpected friendship.

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

All novelists are conjurers, ventriloquists and magicians, but Laird Hunt may be more so than most. In his last three novels, Hunt has inhabited the distinct voices of particular women so thoroughly and so comfortably that it’s possible, after you’ve turned the last page, to forget that the person you’ve just left behind was invented. His people follow you, like it or not.

Another remarkable thing about his novels is that, even though none of them could’ve been written by anyone other than Laird Hunt, no two sound the same. Some of his earlier books, like The Exquisite and Ray of the Star, are dreamy, trippy, ultramodern works of lyrical beauty and mystery, in which alert readers might detect an admiration for Paul Auster—but there’s also Indiana, Indiana, a simple, quiet tale narrated by an old man reflecting on an early love. As different as they are, his books share a richness of language and a vividness of imagery that can seriously blow the mind. Some of his characters speak coyly, some are forthright; many are first one and then the other, to devastating effect.

Hunt’s newest, The Evening Road, is the third in a loosely related trio of novels centering on strong female protagonists at different periods in American history. Neverhome (2014) introduces readers to Ash, aka Constance, a steely young woman who disguises herself as a man in order to fight in the Civil War. In Kind One (2012), most of the story is told by the tough-minded but not especially sympathetic wife of a slave owner in Kentucky; the second part of the story belongs to one of the young black women she used to torment.

The Evening Road follows a similar structure: It opens with Mrs Ottie Lee Henshaw, a spirited young white woman whose boss likes to drive her around and paw at her ineffectively. It's a summer night in 1930, and there’s news of a lynching in a nearby town called Marvel. Ottie Lee’s boss decides they’ll go see it. The lynching, which darkens the edges of the (somehow) often funny narrative, is based on a famous event that happened near where Hunt grew up in Indiana. (It provoked the poem and song “Strange Fruit.”) The second section is narrated by Calla Destry, a street-smart young black woman who is desperate to leave town, but not before having a frank conversation with her beau, a slippery, fast-talking political type.

It’s a road novel that starts from opposite ends of the same road. The characters travel the same miles, intercepting each other yet remaining always in their separate worlds. The harm caused by that separation is one of Hunt’s recurring subjects.

Though the three linked novels aren’t exactly a trilogy, they seem to haunt each other. Certain places and images turn up in all three, creating a sense of a complete world (as well as goosebumps). There’s no need to read them in any specific order, but if you read one, you’ll want to find the rest.

When he’s not making philosophical pronouncements or asking difficult questions, 13-year-old Attila Beck functions as the moral axis around which Joseph Kertes’ slender yet consequential new novel, The Afterlife of Stars, revolves. Kertes, a Hungarian refugee who escaped to Canada after the revolution of 1956, won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction for his previous novel, Gratitude, which also featured the Beck clan. In this book, set 11 years after the end of World War II in Budapest, it’s not the family’s Jewishness that constitutes the existential threat, but their Hungarian identity, as a revolution against Soviet control is brutally crushed in less than two weeks.

Playing Tonto to Attila’s Lone Ranger (and sometimes Estragon to his Vladimir), younger sibling Robert tells the tale of the family’s escape with a clear-eyed innocence that belies his experience as they are driven from Budapest to Paris to some unnamed Canadian destination.

Part of what makes the book so compelling is its sympathetic portrayal of political refugees at a time when they are frequently misunderstood at best, and demonized at worst. And while Hungary’s then-oppressor, the Soviet Union, no longer exists, recent Russian incursions into Ukraine (and Syria) offer a potent reminder of how, even in the course of a single novelist’s lifetime, history can repeat itself.

But the beating heart of this book is the relationship between Robert and Attila, a remarkable pair of brothers whose bond goes beyond affection, beyond shared history, beyond blood. They are two young men who, once met, you’ll never forget.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

That in war the first casualty is the truth is no less true for being trite. Consider the fate of Mata Hari, a Dutch exotic dancer executed by firing squad during the Great War. At the time, the French public was all but united against her. But the evidence that she spied to any significant or damaging degree was as scant as her costumes. Bestselling author Paulo Coehlo (The Alchemist) takes up her case in his masterful new novel The Spy.

Mata Hari was the stage name of Margaretha Zelle. She had a tumultuous childhood. Both her parents died; at age 16 someone raped her. Upon reaching majority, Zelle married an officer and moved to the Dutch East Indies. While abroad Zelle learned Javanese dance. She and her husband divorced, while their two children died from inherited syphilis. Zelle then settled in the Paris of Stravinsky, the newly built Eiffel Tower and the Dreyfus case.

The belle époque was a time of European fascination with things Oriental, and Zelle became something of a sensation. Unfounded rumors abounded that she had Asian blood. People compared her to the biblical Salome. She became a courtesan, hobnobbing with artistic celebrities, including Picasso. 

Then came the war and poverty. And the opportunity to escape from poverty. The Germans offered Zelle 20,000 francs to convey information to them. The pseudonymous dancer now became "H21.” She passed nothing useful, but the French blamed her for the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers. Zelle was defiant to the end, blowing a kiss to her executioners.

Coehlo lets Zelle tell her own story for the most part, although the man who tried to defend her relates the final chapters. Coehlo seeks to make the story an indictment of men, or mankind. Ours is a species too brutal and authoritarian to tolerate the spirited and emancipated, he seems to argue. But he also suggests Zelle is an unreliable narrator, leaving the idea open that she is partly to blame. She had a gift but was not free from vainglory, making her story as well one of pride before a fall.