A moving drama of trauma and recovery.
When a former soldier in the British Army receives a letter inviting him to testify before a Belfast tribunal about a fatal incident that happened 30 years ago, during his tour of duty in Northern Ireland, the reawakened past threatens to destroy not only his hard-won sobriety, but also his newfound—and equally delicate—reconnection with his adult daughter.
Stephen Rose, at the age of 51, has a precarious hold on a quiet existence in Somerset, England. A recovering alcoholic with a wrecked marriage behind him, he is sustained by the reappearance in his life of his daughter, Maggie; by his doctor; and by the unobtrusive support of his Quaker brethren. Stephen knows, however, “how fragile it all is, how we have nothing under our feet, nothing that can be depended on.” A letter requesting his appearance before a Belfast tribunal investigating crimes committed during the Troubles reminds him of this, prompting him to begin the epistle to Maggie that constitutes this moving and insightful narrative. “My head is so crammed with the past,” he writes, “I sometimes have to hang on to things...to stop myself sliding down into it.” Stephen doesn’t slide; he plummets back into the memory of a summer day in Belfast in 1982 when a house search by the British Army turned deadly. The novel’s evocation of that time and place is cinematically clear, and the narrative revolves around that single dread-filled moment. But Stephen’s daily life, in all its middle-aged dreariness and incidental sweetness, is just as sharply drawn, as is his sojourn in the rehab center that sets him on his unsteady feet again and heading back to Belfast. “For a minute or two time circled,” he observes of his first night there. “I was a fifty-something-year-old lying in the filtered air of the hotel room, and a twenty-something sprawled post-patrol on the black plastic of an army mattress.” This immensely skillful novel suspends the reader, too, in that mysterious midway state.
A moving drama of trauma and recovery.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-800-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
