by Barry Unsworth ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 10, 2012
Unsworth returns to themes of greed and human rights in this potent sequel to his 1992 Booker Prize–winning novel Sacred Hunger.
Set in 1767, two years after that epic novel on the British slave trade, this is a slimmer, somewhat less ambitious book. But it still has plenty of intellectual heft; Unsworth remains obsessed with exploring the rationalizations and conditional ethics that permit elites to abuse laborers. Erasmus Kemp, one of the lead characters of Sacred Hunger, returns here with two ambitions: to receive financial compensation from the slaves lost on his father’s ship, and to acquire a coal mine that survives in part on the backs of child labor. Kemp is on the wrong side of history in both cases, but Unsworth doesn’t apply the modern reader’s moral certainties to his characters. For instance, Kemp’s legal adversary is Frederick Ashton, an avowed abolitionist, but Ashton bristles at the notion of equality among races; he simply wants black slaves to be free to return to their homelands. A series of lighter subplots run under that main dispute. Sullivan, a crew member from the Kemp family’s slave ship, escapes from prison and goes on a picaresque Grand Tour of England’s underclass; Michael Bordon, born into a mining family, considers a way to acquire his family’s freedom; and Kemp attempts to woo Ashton’s sister, even though their politics diverge. Unsworth’s knowledge of British history, from abolitionism to mining to courts and commerce, is assured and convincing, as is his ear for dialect; his characters’ places on the class ladder become explicit whenever they speak. The novel’s closing pages feel thinner as Unsworth ties together various plot threads, but the message about how much effort is required to effect social justice never feels didactic or unearned. A sturdy historical novel with fewer pages than Sacred Hunger but no less nuance.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-53477-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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BOOK REVIEW
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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