Hemon pulls no punches in his most ambitious novel to date.
With death the only escape from seemingly endless wars, a Bosnian refugee perseveres.
As this epic novel leaps from country to country, decade to decade, life to death and back again, little seems to connect for Rafael Pinto. He’s a witness to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which ignites the First World War. It also shatters Rafael’s old life in his home in Sarajevo, a city he fears no longer exists as his conscription into warfare takes him farther away. He is an outsider three times over—he's Jewish, he's homosexual, and he finds some respite from his meaningless life in drugs. He lives from moment to moment, for the next kiss, the bliss of the next high. That is, until he makes the crucial connection of his life, to a handsome Muslim soldier named Osman Karišik, who seems to sense a kindred spirit and woos Rafael without much regard to the protocols of their regiment. He might not give Rafael’s life purpose and meaning, but he does give him a reason to live that day and the next, to follow wherever he leads. Even when Osman dies, his voice remains very much alive within Rafael, with its insistence that now is not the time for him to die. Because he somehow has a daughter, who was Osman’s daughter and now his, who will require his protection. Throughout a narrative spanning decades, from Sarajevo to Shanghai, the bleakness of war and its aftershocks remains relentless, “the despair that overwhelmed him in the middle of the night, the horror of an absent future…which is constantly degrading. It is hard to see what the point of any of it is….We just live because we are afraid to die. We live out of cowardice.” Yet the writing remains powerful, beautiful, and the epilogue provides an origin story that puts everything that has preceded it in fresh light.
Hemon pulls no punches in his most ambitious novel to date.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-28770-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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