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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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