Next book

ALTAI

If you like your historical fiction with plenty of explosions and Turkish-inflected interjections (“I do not doubt that our...

More historical fiction alla Bolognese by the Italian committee.

Q, the eponymous hero of the collective’s first offering (under the moniker Luther Blissett), is a man of parts. So is Emmanuele De Zante, who may or may not be a Jew, may or may not be a Venetian, may or may not be on the side of the Turks in the looming war pitting East against West in the mid-16th century. As the tale opens, an explosion has racked Venice—always a topical tale—and the question immediately looms whether the Turks are involved. Those wily Ottomans are an elusive prey, though, and De Zante, who narrates, is a spy to catch out spies, even if innocents are caught in the crossfire and even if De Zante immediately postulates “an enemy other than the Turks.” Ah, but who might that be? There’s always Joseph Nasi, Venetian public enemy No. 1, into whose orbit De Zante is swiftly drawn. Who is De Zante, who is Nasi, and where is the Anabaptist? The action travels smack into the middle of the Battle of Lepanto and smack into the harems of Constantinople, but there are some doldrums in midcourse, as if the young Italian writers couldn’t quite figure out which among them was responsible for tightening the dramatic arc. That said, there’s plenty of intrigue, a bit of metacommentary (and metasituations, as with the presence of a shadowy English spy to foreshadow the later relations of Brits and Turks), and oodles of verisimilitude to carry the tale to its clear-as-mud conclusion.

If you like your historical fiction with plenty of explosions and Turkish-inflected interjections (“I do not doubt that our Muezzinzade Ali Pahsa...will be able to stand up to the infidels”), this is right up your alley.

Pub Date: April 9, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-78168-076-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Verso

Review Posted Online: March 15, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013

Categories:
Next book

THE NIGHTINGALE

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 34


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2018


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

CIRCE

Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 34


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2018


  • New York Times Bestseller

A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.

“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.

Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.

Pub Date: April 10, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

Close Quickview