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FictionPopular FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Four sweeping family sagas to captivate your book club

Feature by Julie Hale

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Independence chronicles the lives of Bengali sisters Deepa, Priya and Jamini beginning in 1947, during a period of upheaval in India. Deepa looks for fulfillment in marriage, while Priya hopes to become a doctor like their father, and Jamini focuses on family and duty. When their father is fatally shot during a riot, their lives are turned upside down. During the Partition of India and Pakistan, each sister is forced to make a life-changing choice. At once a tender family portrait and a powerful exploration of Indian history, Independence is a rewarding book club pick. 

Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai tracks a diverse cast of characters whose lives are impacted by the Vietnam War. Phong, a Black American Vietnamese orphan, searches for his parents and dreams of immigrating to America. Dan, an American helicopter pilot haunted by his experiences in the war, goes back to Vietnam, aiming to lay the past to rest and mend his marriage. This stirring novel offers a nuanced look at how the country was affected by the conflict, and Nguyễn’s examinations of PTSD and racism will get book clubs talking.

Regina Porter’s The Travelers tells the story of two very different American families whose lives become interlaced over the course of several decades, beginning in the 1950s. James Vincent, a prosperous white lawyer, struggles to bond with his son, Rufus. Tensions mount after Rufus marries Claudia Christie, a Black woman. Through flashbacks, Porter provides a poignant account of Agnes, Claudia’s mother, who was raped as a young woman in Georgia. Porter masterfully spins the detailed stories of other family members as she explores the meaning of kinship and connection. The end result is an epic yet intimate tale teeming with humanity.

In Salt Houses, author Hala Alyan follows the Yacoubs, a Palestinian family displaced by the Six-Day War. The conflict splinters the family, as sisters Alia and Widad settle in Kuwait, and their mother goes to Jordan. Despite a troubled marriage, Alia and her husband, Atef, raise three children, two of whom move to America. Through skillful shifts in perspective, Alyan compassionately portrays the lives of the Yacoubs and their experiences across the years. Tradition, identity and assimilation are among the book’s many rich discussion topics.

Journey from India to Palestine, from Vietnam to midcentury America in these stellar reads.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Woman in the Sable Coat

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Elizabeth Brooks returns to World War II-era England with her fourth novel, following two young women connected by their love of the same man. But The Woman in the Sable Coat isn’t a typical story of plucky, cheerful British heroines making a difference to the war effort: Although World War II is at the center of the novel, and its period details are sharply etched, this is a darker, more Gothic-leaning story.

Nina Woodrow and Kate Nicholson are first brought together on an August afternoon in 1934 when 14-year-old Nina is on the outs with her best friend, Rose, and Kate, married to her childhood friend Guy Nicholson, is pregnant and miserable in their new home in Cottenden village. That night, a spontaneous dinner party has both Nina and Kate acting impulsively and seemingly out of character.

Eight years later, the war is grinding on. Nina, now 22, has joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, where she folds silk parachutes and tries to find her footing. Back in Cottenden, Kate cares for her son, Pip, and takes in refugees. But Guy, now a Royal Air Force Pilot at the same base as Nina, tells Kate he wants a divorce and that he’s in love with Nina. This revelation draws the despairing Kate to Nina’s father Henry, an awkward, cautious widower.

The novel rotates between Nina’s and Kate’s perspectives, as each contrives to live with her decisions and precarious situations: Nina as the second wife of a divorced man and Kate as a divorcee. With a sense of suspense and menace in the vein of Daphne du Maurier (to whom there’s a nod as Kate obsessively reads du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek), The Woman in the Sable Coat lays clues for the reader to suspect a long-hidden deception, a secret that turns out to affect both women in unexpected ways. The novel also shows how the era’s prim morality feels suffocating for middle-class women, and how the trauma of the Great War still reverberates for some of these characters decades later. The Woman in the Sable Coat is a slow burn of a novel, with a lovely, surprising moment of redemption and connection for both Nina and Kate at the story’s end.

The Woman in the Sable Coat isn’t a typical story of plucky, cheerful British heroines making a difference to the war effort: Although World War II is at the center of the novel, and its period details are sharply etched, this is a darker, more Gothic-leaning story.
FictionInspirational FictionHistorical Fiction

Christian fiction picks for spring 2024

Feature by Edith Kanyagia

The American Queen

Bestselling author Vanessa Miller has penned yet another moving and illuminating novel in The American Queen. Inspired by a true story, it celebrates a Black woman’s pursuit of freedom and a community’s undying courage.

It is 1864, and though President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation over a year ago, Louella is still enslaved at the Montgomery Plantation in Mississippi. Emboldened by a speech of her father’s about revolution and freedom—one that later costs him his life—Louella decides to risk her own life to become a free woman. Together with her loving husband, William, she leads her community on a journey fraught with unimaginable obstacles to build a kingdom founded on equality, justice and love.

An indestructible spirit shines through the hardship and cruelty Louella and her community face. Brutal beatings and murders are constant on the plantation, and even after they establish their Kingdom of the Happy Land, inequality, injustice and attacks by the Ku Klux Klan threaten to destroy everything they have painstakingly built. Still, they persevere and create a society where Black people can not only live freely but also pursue their dreams.

With gentleness and empathy, Miller examines the complex relationship between faith and adversity. Though she is inspired by William’s faith, Louella struggles to reconcile her circumstances with God’s promises. Having lost both her mother and father, hate settles in her heart towards those who continuously seek to subdue Black people. Louella’s spiritual journey is beautifully chronicled, and by the end of the novel, her growth is evident.

 

The Irish Matchmaker

Matchmaking season is approaching and Lisdoonvarna’s matchmakers, Catriona Daly and her father, are preparing for the 1905 Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival. Though she’s helped many in the town find love, Catriona herself has been unsuccessful. With each matchmaking season, her hopes of finding her true love and finally leaving Lisdoonvarna are reignited. When Catriona is asked to be the matchmaker for Lord Osborne’s son, Andrew, she instead hopes to catch Andrew’s eye herself, and sets out to become the bride his family wants for him.

Meanwhile, Donal Bunratty is struggling to provide for his young daughter while facing the possibility of losing his farm. Fifty years after the Great Famine, Ireland is still suffering from its impact. Donal’s farm is not as productive as it once was, and without help, he may soon be forced to give it up. Though he misses his late wife, he decides to take part in the matchmaking festival with his daughter’s encouragement.

Filled with delightful twists, The Irish Matchmaker is an immersive story about faith and finding love in unexpected places from Jennifer Deibel, the author of A Dance in Donegal, The Lady of Galway Manor and The Maid of Ballymacool. Deibel skillfully weaves Donal and Catriona’s stories, creating realistic characters and a fascinating storyline. She also takes an honest look at the crushing impact of economic hardship and explores the role of faith when all hope seems lost.

 

The Foxhole Victory Tour

With enchanting prose, author Amy Lynn Green’s endearing historical novel, The Foxhole Victory Tour, follows the intriguing adventures of a group of USO performers during World War II.

Socialite Catherine Duquette joins a USO tour set to travel across part of North Africa, hoping to escape her sheltered life and find out what happened to Sergeant Leo Wallace, a pilot she’s in love with who suddenly stopped responding to her letters. After getting fired from her dream job, musician Maggie McCleod joins the USO camp show as well. Their unit also includes a magician, a tap dancer and a singer. As the group starts to bond, they learn that the USO talent manager will be selecting only one of them for the prestigious Pepsodent Show tour, a career-making opportunity that all of them are determined to land.

Green crafts a compelling and original cast of characters. Maggie is outspoken and witty, while Catherine is sophisticated and conflict avoidant. Then there is Gabriel, the pensive, withdrawn magician; Judith, the private and skeptical singer; Howie, the experienced tap dancer; and Douglas, their businesslike talent manager. The opportunity to grow their career adds an interesting twist to the group’s dynamics. All of them want to be selected for different, valid reasons. They grow individually and as a group, and beautifully exemplify the themes of friendship, faith and resilience explored in the novel.

The Foxhole Victory Tour is an eye-opening look at the experiences of brave USO performers who helped build troops’ morale and keep them connected to their lives back home during WWII.

Three Christian historical novels laud the power of faith, love and commitment in overcoming risk and tragedy.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Great Divide

Review by Laura Sackton

In The Great Divide, her first novel since 2014’s The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Henriquez paints an intricate, layered portrait of a monumental moment in the history of the Americas: the construction of the Panama Canal. Set in 1907, this polyvocal novel is a powerful act of witness and remembrance.

Instead of focusing on only one character, Henriquez threads together the stories of over a dozen people whose lives are profoundly affected by the canal project. This inspired choice suits the scope of the event and hints at even more stories beyond these pages: It’s easy to imagine, in the snippets of lives that Henriquez zooms in on, just how many more love stories, deaths, moments of radicalization, migrations, injustices, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the construction of the canal between 1903 and 1914.

The characters come from many countries and a wide range of backgrounds. There’s Francisco, a Panamanian fisherman who’s disgusted at what the canal project is doing to his country, and his son Omar, whose decision to work in the excavation zone causes a deep rift between them. There’s Ada, a girl from Barbados who arrives in Panama hoping to earn enough money to help her ill sister back home. She finds work in the house of John and Marian Oswald, a white American couple who have come to the isthmus in the hopes that John can eradicate malaria. Joaquin, a fishmonger who’s mostly content to live an ordinary life in the city, gets swept up in his wife’s burgeoning protest movement when she finds out her hometown is being forcibly moved to make space for the canal.

Additional points of view include those of canal workers from across the Caribbean, a foreman, a mail carrier, a young woman with dreams of becoming a photojournalist and an egotistical French doctor. The canal disrupts their lives in different ways: It kills some of them and makes others rich.

The Great Divide is a collection of small narratives that together create a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. The novel’s greatest strength is this unrelenting smallness. It insists on the importance of every human life, and illuminates the endless, ordinary, forgotten stories that underlie every pivotal moment in human history.

Cristina Henríquez’s polyvocal novel is a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. It’s easy to imagine, in these snippets of lives, just how many more love stories, deaths, migrations, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the canal’s construction.
FictionWorld FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Cozy reads for long winter nights

Feature by the editors of BookPage

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

As the days become shorter, there’s nothing more comforting than immersing myself in a sweeping historical novel—the bigger, the better! When my book club recently voted to read Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, I welcomed the opportunity to escape nightly into the grand halls of the Metropol hotel where aristocrat Count Alexander Rostov, deemed a threat by the Bolsheviks in 1922, is sentenced to lifelong house arrest. Hotel employees, guests and other visitors round out the vibrant cast of characters in the Count’s orbit as he adjusts to his new circumstances and tries to pursue a meaningful life in confinement. His friendship with precocious 9-year-old Nina is particularly endearing; the pair’s quest to explore every nook and cranny of the hotel is a delight. All the while, outside the Count’s window, political turmoil and inevitable social change are transforming Russian society. Written with wit and warmth, Towles’ tale is one you’ll want to curl up with and return to night after night.

—Katherine, Subscriptions 

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

I spent a few sublime weeks last winter in the company of Umberto Eco’s magisterial debut novel, The Name of the Rose. This medieval whodunit is intellectually absorbing and slyly hilarious as it tracks Brother William of Baskerville and Brother Adso of Melk’s quest to solve a spree of bizarre murders at a monastery in Italy. A historian, philosopher and literary theorist, Eco transports readers into the 14th-century mind, and while things get heady (at one point, Adso contemplates a door for more than a page), Eco never lets his own erudition run away with him. There are impressively gruesome deaths to describe, tangled little dramas of monastery life to tease out and one of the most unforgettable libraries in literature to explore. I read long into the night, wrapped in blankets with a mug of tea at hand, happily looking up Latin phrases and medieval heretics until arriving at Eco’s grand finale, a satisfying conclusion with a few icy notes of existential dread to balance things out.

—Savanna, Managing Editor

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide

To me, coziness is a cat dozing on my lap, but a book that captures the magic of our purring friends will also do. A sublime, delicate meditation on the passage of time within everyday life, Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat washes over you like a dream, making it an ideal read for a long winter night. A male narrator and his wife fall in love with their neighbor’s cat, naming her Chibi as she begins visiting them at their rented house. The wife tells the man how a philosopher once said that “observation is at its core an expression of love,” and indeed, Hiraide’s ruminations on the quotidian—dragonflies flying towards water sprayed from a garden hose, Chibi climbing a tree—carry tremendous emotion despite the unembellished prose. With equal parts joy and melancholy, the couple’s relationships with the cat and each other shift, along with the course of their lives and Japan, as the late ’80s economic bubble bursts. Hiraide slips in and out of reflection and memory with precise, feline grace.

—Yi, Associate Editor

The New Life by Tom Crewe

There is something so pleasurable about spending a chilly day absorbed in the concerns of another time and identifying resonances with our own. Tom Crewe’s debut novel, The New Life, provides just such a pleasure, placing vivid characters and thorny moral dilemmas against a finely textured historical backdrop. Based on two real life freethinkers in late Victorian Britain, Crewe’s John Addington and Henry Ellis are documenting the lives of gay men for a book that they hope will shift cultural perceptions of homosexuality. It’s risky, but they believe in the cause—and that their status as married men will protect them. However, ideological differences emerge, and Addington begins to wonder if ideals can be legitimate if they are not lived openly. Crewe excels when depicting the nuances of conflict and the question of balancing personal risk against the ability to effect change, drawing readers in with polished old-fashioned storytelling that also speaks to a modern sensibility—A.S. Byatt meets Alan Hollinghurst.

—Trisha, Publisher

Ready the fireplace, put the kettle on and get out some thick woolen socks. These four titles are worthy companions for long winter nights.
FictionWesternHistorical FictionFamily Saga

The Bullet Swallower

Review by Thane Tierney

The Old Testament book of Ezekiel states that “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.” In theory, while wealth may be passed along from generation to generation, debts—even those of the karmic nature—aren’t.

Try telling that to any of the Sonoro clan, the family at the center of Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ dual-timeline magical realist tour de force, The Bullet Swallower.

Beginning with patriarch Alferez Antonio in the 1800s, the Sonoros have committed all manner of sins in the name of ambition, from running a gold mine with slave labor to robbing a train at the turn of the 20th century. When the latter goes sideways, Antonio Sonoro is shot by the Texas Rangers and left for dead in the desert. His henchman brother is killed, but Antonio survives and swears a blood oath for revenge—rechristening himself as El Tragabalas, the Bullet Swallower.

A century later, in 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s number one box-office draw, a much-beloved movie star and performer known as El Gallo (The Rooster). While relaxing at home after a grueling tour, he’s visited by someone whom he believes to be a fan, bearing a strange gift: an ancient volume entitled The Ignominious History of the Sonoro Family from Antiquity to the Present Day.

Ping-ponging back and forth across the decades, Gonzalez James constructs a dynastic legacy that is shrouded in mystery and carries more than a hint of danger. When Jaime tries to pry some of the family’s more recent history out of his tight-lipped father, the old man replies, “Did you ever think that the reason I never said anything about them is because it’s too painful?” And when a shadowy figure named Remedio inserts himself unexpectedly into Jaime’s household, the story takes on an element of the supernatural.

All this would be remarkable enough, but it’s made even more so by the fact that The Bullet Swallower is based, albeit loosely, on Gonzalez James’ own family history. As she puts it in the author’s note, “Everything in this book is true except for the stuff I made up.” So while the son—or in this case the great-granddaughter—may not bear the iniquity of the father, it seems she does wind up bearing witness to it.

Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ dual-timeline magical realist tour de force presents the dynastic legacy of the Sonoro family—one that is shrouded in mystery and carries more than a hint of danger.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Wolves of Winter

Review by Matthew Jackson

With his debut novel, Essex Dogs, popular historian Dan Jones proved that he could take his expertise in medieval history and translate it into compelling, immensely readable fiction. Now, with Wolves of Winter Jones manages to do it again—and then some.

A direct sequel to Essex Dogs, Wolves of Winter picks up on the adventures of a band of soldiers and friends serving in the army of King Edward III in the midst of the Hundred Years War. In the wake of the English victory at the battle of Crecy, the Essex Dogs are convinced they’re going home soon, with pockets full of whatever plunder they’ve managed to scrape together. But the King and his noble allies have other plans. For reasons no one in the army’s rank and file can quite grasp, the English are preparing to lay siege to Calais, a small French port town surrounded by treacherous marshes. So, instead of going home, the Dogs continue on to Calais, even as a man they thought they left in the past creeps up behind them.

Throughout the action, Jones maintains a clear, confident grasp on the historical details, from the weapons the Dogs use to the surprising way that pirates factor into the Calais story. And just as in Essex Dogs, none of that detail ever distracts from the narrative, character development or emotional stakes. Jones’ themes have also matured and deepened, as the mysteries of the siege of Calais offer plenty of new opportunities to explore the futility of war from the Dogs’ perspective. Crecy was such a triumph that to keep fighting feels like an exercise in foolish bravado. As the Essex Dogs descend into the literal quagmire around Calais, they begin pondering the steps that led them to this point, considering whether control over their destinies is possible in a world ruled by those richer and more influential. It’s a study in maturation for an author who was already working at a high level; the added depth never gets in the way of the swashbuckling, epic action of the battles.

Wolves of Winter is another rollicking success for Dan Jones, cementing him as a master of historical fiction and leaving us counting the days until we can read what the Essex Dogs do next.

Wolves of Winter is another rollicking success for Dan Jones, leaving us counting the days until we can read what the Essex Dogs do next.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

The Women

Review by Alice Cary

“Some women had worn love beads in the sixties; others had worn dog tags,” Kristin Hannah writes in The Women, her salute to American women who were nurses in the Vietnam War. It’s a book she has long wanted to write—since 1997—but didn’t feel ready to tackle until now. As she’s done before in runaway bestsellers like The Nightingale, The Great Alone and The Four Winds, Hannah demonstrates her knack for blending broad sweeps of history with page-turning plots to immediately engross legions of readers in even the most difficult of subjects.

The story covers more than 20 years, beginning in 1966 when 21-year-old Frankie McGrath impetuously joins the Army Nurse Corps, hoping to follow her beloved brother, Finley, to Vietnam. Her well-to-do parents live on Coronado Island in California and are very much concerned with keeping up appearances. Frankie’s father keeps a “Wall of Heroes” in his office filled with portraits of their family’s military veterans, even though he, to his shame, was declared ineligible to serve. Frankie’s life changes when one of her brother’s friends tells her, “Women can be heroes.”

Frankie arrives in Vietnam as a clueless, newly minted nurse, but she rises to the horrific circumstances and ends up finding her calling in life, as well as a turbulent romance. She slowly grows into a highly skilled surgical combat nurse, and the scenes of her working are particularly immersive, showing readers the traumatic experiences that soldiers, nurses and doctors experienced on a daily basis.

Over 265,000 women served during the Vietnam era, including about 10,000 American military women stationed in Vietnam during the war, most of them nurses. And yet, after the war, these women were met with remarks like “There were no women in Vietnam.” That’s the reaction Frankie gets when she returns home, and the last half of the book deals with her struggle with Americans who have little idea of or respect for what she’s been through. Her parents compound her feelings of shame and confusion when they reveal that they explained her absence to their friends by pretending Frankie had been studying abroad. Amidst so much misunderstanding, she relies on the support of two lifelong nursing friends as she deals with post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and depression.

In true Hannah fashion, The Women delivers a compelling read as well as a new understanding of the Vietnam era.

Kristin Hannah demonstrates her knack for blending broad sweeps of history with page-turning plots in this salute to military and civilian women who served during the Vietnam era.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Fox Wife

Review by Freya Sachs

Foxes, trains, elaborate outfits, witty sayings, luck and chance, the last days of an empire. Told in two voices, Yangsze Choo’s The Fox Wife is a fitting follow up to Choo’s previous novels, The Ghost Bride and The Night Tiger.

Set in Manchuria in 1908, The Fox Wife plays with Chinese myths about the fox gods: foxes with the ability to transform themselves into beguiling, beautiful and tormented men and women. Legend has it that these fox gods sometimes live among people, causing trouble through their trickery and slippery relationship to the truth.

Equipped with an extreme sensitivity to the presence of truth, Bao is a detective on a mission to figure out what happened to a woman found frozen to death on the doorstep of a restaurant. His chapters—told from a third-person perspective—enthrall with keen observations about the gods, his own past and the people around him.

Snow is on her own quest to understand the death of her only child. She begins working for a family who has been cursed: Their sons die young. Her first-person chapters are particularly intriguing, with a strong voice and sharp turns of phrase. Who is Snow? And what will her journey allow her to discover?

As the story alternates between Snow’s and Bao’s perspectives, the pull to solve these mysteries builds momentum. The voices are compelling; the secrets are rich. When the two tales begin to overlap and the gaps fill in, the surprise is worth the wait. Layers of meaning accrue, bringing together the past and the present, mythology and personal ambition, actions and reactions, control and fate, into a fascinating tale of foxes, foes and friends.

Set in Manchuria in 1908, The Fox Wife combines Chinese myths about fox gods who live among people and the story of a detective determined to uncover the truth behind a woman’s mysterious death.
FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Cover reveal: ‘Familiaris’ by David Wroblewski

Feature by Phoebe Farrell-Sherman

David Wroblewski spent 10 years writing his first book, the remarkable instant classic The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Now, 16 years later, he’s delivering a follow-up: Familiaris, which will go on sale June 4th, and is available for preorder now.

We’re thrilled to reveal the beautiful cover, as well as an exclusive excerpt, below, but first, here’s the official synopsis:

It is spring 1919, and John Sawtelle’s imagination has gotten him into trouble . . . again. Now John and his newlywed wife, Mary, along with their two best friends and their three dogs, are setting off for Wisconsin’s northwoods, where they hope to make a fresh start—and, with a little luck, discover what it takes to live a life of meaning, purpose, and adventure. But the place they are headed for is far stranger and more perilous than they realize, and it will take all their ingenuity, along with a few new friends—human, animal, and otherworldly—to realize their dreams.

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, mysterious and enchanting, Familiaris takes readers on an unforgettable journey from the halls of a small-town automobile factory, through an epic midwestern firestorm and an ambitious WWII dog-training program, and far back into mankind’s ancient past, examining the dynamics of love and friendship, the vexing nature of families, the universal desire to create something lasting and beautiful, and of course, the species-long partnership between Homo sapiens and Canis familiaris.

Cover design by Alenka Linaschke.

Read on for an exclusive first look at the cover of the epic follow-up to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, plus a sneak peek of the first chapter.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Goldenseal

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Maria Hummel’s fifth novel offers the atmospheric story of an old friendship gone awry. As Goldenseal opens in 1990, Edith has arrived in Los Angeles, a city that’s unrecognizable to her after 40 years in Maine. Her destination is a grand hotel she once knew well. Waiting for Edith is Lacey, who has withdrawn not only from her old friend, but from the world, making herself a recluse high above the city in the hotel her father owned for decades. 

Lacey is agitated and doesn’t know why Edith has returned, but she has planned a fancy room service dinner for the two of them. As the dinner begins, the two are wary, feeling the presence of the long-ago rupture in their friendship. At 70, Lacey is troubled and fragile, while Edith is restrained, a cipher, “the headmistress incarnate.” Both women have been pummeled by time and by the world.

As each woman guardedly tells the other her perspective, we learn how Lacey and Edith became like sisters. Occasionally, one will wish for more of this recounting to be shown in scene rather than dialogue, because the novel describes Edith and Lacey’s youth so gorgeously, beginning with Lacey’s late-1930s childhood in her beloved Prague before the sudden move with her Mutti and Papi to New York City as war and the Holocaust loom. When Lacey is sent to summer camp in Maine, she encounters Edith, and they begin an intense friendship. They’re outwardly opposites: Lacey is a pampered only child, while Edith was born into rural poverty and is attending camp on scholarship because her father is the camp’s handyman. Eventually, Edith and Lacey both follow Lacey’s parents to Los Angeles to try out the film business, setting in motion the events that cause their dramatic split. In the novel’s present, the reunion dinner’s end leads to a surprising moment of tenderness: a bittersweet, fitting conclusion. 

In the afterword, Hummel notes that she wrote Goldenseal as an homage to Hungarian author S&aacutendor M&aacuterai’s novel Embers, drawing her structure—two old friends reuniting for one night after a 40-year rift—from the older novel. Goldenseal is an inventive, immersive book recounting the particular past, old hurts and late healing of two singular characters.

Maria Hummel’s Goldenseal is an inventive, immersive novel recounting the reunion of two old friends 40 years after a dramatic rupture.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Curse of Pietro Houdini

Review by Alice Cary

The mysterious, flamboyant Pietro Houdini calls himself “Chemist. Painter. Scholar. Master artist and confidant of the Vatican.” Whatever he may or may not be, to Massimo, the narrator of The Curse of Pietro Houdini, Pietro is a savior. On the day that they meet in August, 1943, 14-year-old Massimo’s parents have been killed in the bombing of Rome, and Massimo lies beaten in a gutter. Pietro immediately takes Massimo under his wing, and the two head up the hill to seek shelter in a towering abbey in the Italian village of Montecassino.

The Curse of Pietro Houdini boasts a little bit of everything—a truly fascinating setting; an account of pivotal, yet little-known events of World War II; rich, quirky characters; tragedy, suspense, warmth and humor. Readers will quickly discover that unusual, dangerous times call for creative acts of deception on the part of both main characters, whose relationship forms the heart of this unforgettable, cinematic story. Massimo, who narrates the events from an adult perspective, notes: “The man I knew was a thinker and a storyteller and a liar who had as little reverence for the facts as P.T. Barnum.”

The abbey houses over 70,000 manuscripts and works of art, many of them moved there from museums for safekeeping during the war. Now, with an Allied bombing seemingly imminent, two real-life German officers, Julius Schlegel and Maximilian Becker, are secretly carting them out as quickly as possible, sending them back to the Vatican. Pietro hatches his own scheme—”the first art heist within an art heist in the history of the world”—to paint over three undiscovered Titians and sneak them out with Massimo’s help. Along the way, the plotting pair encounter a rich cast of characters and endure many suspenseful, heart-pounding and heartbreaking moments.

Derek B. Miller—the author of How to Find Your Way in the Dark and Norwegian by Night—has shown the range of his talents in six previous novels, but this may be his masterpiece: an epic novel that manages to convey an extraordinary yet realistic story encapsulating the horrors of war. As Pietro explains, “That’s what art does, my child. It opens our hearts to the human condition.”

Read our interview with Derek B. Miller for The Curse of Pietro Houdini.

The Curse of Pietro Houdini boasts a little bit of everything—a truly fascinating setting; rich, quirky characters; tragedy, suspense, warmth and humor. Derek B. Miller has shown the range of his talents in six previous novels, but this may be his masterpiece.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Shining light on a forgotten story of WWII

Interview by Alice Cary

As Derek B. Miller sat down to write his seventh novel, The Curse of Pietro Houdini, something magical happened. “I wrote a great first sentence that somehow embedded the whole book,” he says, speaking from his home in Spain. “This is the only time this has ever happened to me.”

Miller had already chosen the setting for this spellbinding historical saga—a Benedictine abbey near Montecassino, Italy, during World War II. In 1944, American pilots dropped more bombs on this hilltop sanctuary than any other single building, mistakenly believing it to be occupied by German forces. While stories abound about the invasion of Normandy, few Americans are familiar with this military operation.
“I have a Ph.D. in international relations,” Miller notes, “and I didn’t know about it.” Part of the reason, he explains, is that “it’s just not a good old-fashioned American hero story. The battle went on for months and months and killed a lot of people.” What’s more, the abbey had been housing thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts and art, sent there for safekeeping in 1943. Thankfully, night after night, a German and an Austrian officer, with the help of the monks, loaded this treasure trove into carts and moved it to Rome before the Allied destruction began—a secretive mission described in his book. “I don’t think an abbey has called out to have its own story since The Name of the Rose,” Miller adds, referring to Umberto Eco’s famed murder mystery.

“I just love big, opinionated, risk-taking, take-no-prisoners central characters.”

Miller was introduced to the Montecassino abbey while working on a previous novel, Radio Life, which was inspired by the acclaimed 1959 science fiction classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-apocalyptic story about monks who protect books during nuclear war and its aftermath by hiding them in an abbey. The book’s author, Walter J. Miller (no relation) was a radioman and tail gunner whose role in the Montecassino abbey bombing left him with post-traumatic stress disorder and undoubtedly inspired Canticle. Now, Derek Miller wanted to explore the setting of the abbey itself, but he was having trouble deciding what story he wanted to tell. “This isn’t nonfiction,” Miller says. “I didn’t want to be an academic. I wanted to be a dramatist. And I wanted to find the story within the story that could be mine.”

The plot finally began to emerge when Miller wrote that first sentence—“Pietro Houdini claimed that life clung to him like a curse and if he could escape it he would.” Instantaneously, one of the novel’s two main characters sprang into focus. As his name implies, Houdini is a larger-than-life character who may not be what he claims to be: a “master artist and confidant of the Vatican.” “I just love big, opinionated, risk-taking, take-no-prisoners central characters,” Miller says.

“Once the name popped out,” Miller continues, “once I had Houdini and a curse, and the abbey all sort of there, I realized that interrogating the curse mattered. And I was wondering who else was there? Who was he talking to? Who would care about something like that?” Before long, Miller envisioned an orphaned 14-year-old—Massimo—whom Pietro finds lying battered and beaten in a gutter. The two walk up the hill to the abbey, setting into motion a vibrant, well-crafted tale that’s rich in history, drama, intrigue, tragedy and well-placed doses of humor—at which Miller excels. Ultimately, he has created a story about both the heroics and the horrors of war, as well as the powerful bonds that can form in the midst of calamity.

Massimo’s first-person narration convincingly guides the book, and it is framed by an introduction and conclusion written from Massimo’s adult perspective decades later. “When I’m writing,” Miller explains, “I really have no idea what’s going to happen next. I only had milestones and a chronology [of historical events] that I decided to stick to seriously, partly because I’m a scholar.” Many readers, in fact, may be reminded of Anthony Doerr’s beloved World War II novel, All the Light We Cannot See. “This is going to sound shocking,” Miller says, “but I haven’t read it yet.”

Similarly surprising comparisons were made after the publication of his award-winning novel, Norwegian by Night: People complimented him on doing such a wonderful job writing Scandinavian crime. “I said, ‘That’s interesting, I’ve never heard of it.’ I thought I was writing a story about an old Jewish guy running through the woods in Norway. But apparently, it was part of an entire genre that I was unaware of, even though I was living in Norway at the time.”

“I haven’t really written love stories as such—you know, boy-meets-girl, that kind of thing. But there is, very much with Pietro and Massimo, love.”

Both Norwegian by Night and The Curse of Pietro Houdini feature an adult and child paired as main characters. “A lot of my books are really quite multigenerational,” Miller says. “It gives me tremendous scope for wisdom, dialogue, humor, misunderstanding and competing interpretations. And it’s fun, because old people being frustrated with young people, and young people being frustrated with old people is just hilarious.”

Miller also describes the pairing as a “useful literary device,” saying, “It’s always helpful for somebody in the know to have somebody to talk to who’s not in the know for the benefit of the reader. And in my books, there’s a lot going on.” Such a marvelous embarrassment of riches is certainly the case in The Curse of Pietro Houdini, in which many of Pietro’s discussions of art, history and the war with Massimo serve as vital backstory provided in an entertaining fashion. Miller points to the power of the connection that these characters establish, saying, “Being alone and then finding someone to connect with in the midst of that loneliness is essential in the human experience. I haven’t really written love stories as such—you know, boy-meets-girl, that kind of thing. But there is, very much with Pietro and Massimo, love.”

“Writing is a full-contact blood sport,” Miller concludes. “It’s a crazy way to make a living—almost an impossible way.” He started trying his hand at fiction during a number of unscheduled months spent waiting for his Ph.D. program to begin in Switzerland, and he continued with the craft alongside his studies. He eventually published his third manuscript, Norwegian by Night, in 2008, after 12 years of writing. That book came together when he elevated Sheldon Horowitz, who had been a minor character in a draft manuscript, to a central character. He turned out to be such a wonderful personality that Miller later wrote a prequel about his childhood, the suspenseful tragicomedy How to Find Your Way in the Dark.

Now Miller is working on a book set in the late 1950s on the coast of Spain, where Salvador Dali had his house in Cadaqués. Miller and his family live about an hour south of Barcelona, after living and working in Norway for a number of years (Miller’s wife is Norwegian). “I needed a change and it’s an adventure for the kids,” he says. “Life is short, so you take some bold decisions, if you’re so inclined.”

At some point, Miller hopes to finally visit the Montecassino abbey, which has been rebuilt since the World War II bombing. He says, “My deep, deep hope is that I can get The Curse of Pietro Houdini translated into Italian and that I have an excellent reason to go.”

Read our starred review of The Curse of Pietro Houdini.

Author photo by Camilla Waszink.

Derek B. Miller returns with a captivating historical tale centered on a pivotal yet rarely told episode of WWII: the bombing of the abbey of Montecassino, Italy. When a mysterious master artist, or possibly master con artist, and a 14-year-old orphan take shelter in the abbey, they are drawn into the mission to save precious art stored there from destruction. The adventure that ensues is tragic, funny and thrilling, with plenty of sleight of hand and even more heart.

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