A tightly constructed family drama with surprising complications.
Nobel Prize–winning novelist Gurnah delivers a story whose title reverberates throughout.
Raya is a beauty who, having caught the eye of a revolutionary soldier in the colonial Tanzania of the early 1960s, is instead married off quickly to an older man whom she does not love and who “was relentless in his demand for her body.” She finally leaves him, taking her 3-year-old son, Karim, with her. He is mostly an afterthought; as Gurnah writes, somberly, “Karim’s mother treated him like a possession she was fond of but the details of whose welfare she was happy to leave to her parents.” Finding new love, she leaves Karim with them; only two years later is he invited to visit her in her new home in Dar es Salaam. Without much ambition, he finally moves in with Raya and her husband, Haji, to attend university, a household arrangement augmented by the arrival of a young man, Badar, a villager who, though a kinsman of Haji’s, is treated as a servant. Badar is uncomplaining, though he harbors a hatred for the father who abandoned him: “He could not remember when he started to think of him as a shithead,” but the feeling runs deep. An accusation of theft shatters the uneasy peace of the household, unfounded though it is; it will not be the first time that Badar comes under suspicion, although it is the late-blossoming and suddenly career-minded Karim who abuses Badar’s trust—and that’s just the start of it. No word is wasted as Gurnah steadily subverts the good will he has built for Karim and reveals Badar to be less passive than he appears. Unexpectedly, the story even has a happy ending, if only for Badar—and given the trials he’s put through by hapless Western tourists, arrogant aid workers, and his own family, that’s a relief.
A tightly constructed family drama with surprising complications.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593852606
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: today
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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