Perfect for readers who appreciate thoughtful and substantive fiction.
One family’s odyssey spotlights England’s transformation between VE Day and the coronavirus pandemic.
Just south of grimy industrial Birmingham, Bournville was established in the late 19th century by the Cadbury family as a model village with healthy housing and amenities for the workers in their chocolate factory. It’s there in 1945 that 11-year-old Mary joins a celebration of the European war’s end that introduces her to her future husband—and to the bigoted nationalism that will contend into the next century with a more expansive view of Britain’s future. In 1953, she becomes engaged to stodgy, conservative Geoffrey Lamb around the time of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation; it’s the second in a series of iconic events on which Coe hangs his exploration of intermingled societal and personal change. By the time of the England-West Germany World Cup final in 1966, the Lambs have three sons with very different personalities and outlooks. Eldest Jack has Mary’s outgoing nature but shares Geoffrey’s values; by the end of the novel, he’s a Brexit supporter and admirer of Boris Johnson. (Johnson flits around the fringes of the story, seen first as a joke and then revealed to be a shrewd manipulator of social anxieties.) Quiet, deliberate Martin—married to a Black woman, to Geoffrey’s open dismay—works for Cadbury; his efforts to get English chocolate certified for sale in the European Union provide a hilarious scene of E.U. dysfunction. Youngest son Peter, a musician, finally acknowledges that he's gay during the period of turbulent emotionalism surrounding the death of Princess Diana, an episode of national hysteria that most of the Lamb family (except Jack, of course) regard with bemusement. As Coe follows his richly characterized cast across 75 years, he hews to the venerable traditions of the English realistic novel, capturing Britain’s increasingly diverse, cosmopolitan society in the varying reactions of his characters. The pandemic-restricted commemorations of VE Day’s 75th anniversary bring this pensive novel to an appropriately sober close.
Perfect for readers who appreciate thoughtful and substantive fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781609459420
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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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