ALL OF YOU EVERY SINGLE ONE

Set in Vienna, Hitchman’s historical novel traces the course of queer love and friendship over three tumultuous decades.

In 1910, the Austro-Hungarian capital is the “greatest city in the Western Hemisphere,” where “art and music flourish” and “Herr Doktor Freud” analyzes troubled minds. Among its newest arrivals are Eve Perret, a skilled tailor who dresses as a man, and the beautiful and spoiled Julia Lindqvist, who has left her Swedish playwright husband to be with Eve. With very little money, the couple settle in the Jewish quarter of Leopoldstadt, where their landlady, Frau Berndt, introduces them to fellow tenant Rolf Gruber, a flamboyant would-be theater impresario. After he helps Eve get a job, she discovers that he too is gay. “He is like us,” she excitedly tells Julia. “He loves men.” The two women gradually build a small community of friends and neighbors, but Julia’s desire for a child overshadows their happiness. Shifting narrative perspectives, Hitchman also introduces 16-year-old Ada Bauer, who has a crush on her closeted cousin Emil’s wife, Isabella. When Isabella becomes pregnant, Ada and Rolf, Emil’s spurned lover, hatch a plot with life-altering consequences. Hitchman excels at capturing both the liberating permissiveness of turn-of-the-century Vienna and the city’s paralyzing fear after Hitler’s 1938 annexation of Austria, but the big time jump between 1913, when the novel’s first part ends, and 1938 and then 1946 feels jarring. Her main characters are sympathetically drawn, but all are not given equal focus. The more compelling Eve receives less attention than the self-absorbed Julia; how did she cope as a butch lesbian when the Nazis began cracking down on Jews, homosexuals, and other “undesirables”?

An engrossing, if flawed, novel.