09/14/2020
In Windley’s enthralling epic (after the collection Breathing Under Water), a chance meeting on a train leads to a bond between two women decades later. Fourteen-year-old Natalia Faber and her mother, Beatriz, leave their home near Berlin in 1927 to visit a spa in Hungary. Natalia watches a man dying on their train as a young doctor, Magdalena Schaefferova, tries to save him. While staying at the spa, Beatriz meets Miklós Andorján, a budding journalist, and the next year they are married. In 1942, Miklós goes east to Russia on an assignment, and Natalia goes to Prague to find him. While in Prague, Natalia makes a meager living telling fortunes, gets reacquainted with Magdalena, and meets Magdalena’s daughter, Anna, before Natalia is sent to a concentration camp as a political prisoner. After her camp is liberated, Natalia reunites with Anna and continues the search for Miklós, while Anna reckons with the effects of the war on her own family. The author skillfully conveys the political and social upheaval in WWII-era Europe through the perspectives of journalists, soldiers, and doctors. Fans of WWII fiction will appreciate this accomplished take. (Nov.)
Praise for Midnight Train to Prague
Shortlisted for the Vine Awards
“An original and compelling story, told with vivid detail and a richness in setting that I absorbed in one sitting. Windley’s characters are symbols of a disappearing era, as they navigate the dramatically shifting political landscape of central Europe teetering between wars.”—Ellen Keith, bestselling author of The Dutch Wife
“While there is certainly a place for wartime fiction that focuses on romance or intrepid female spies, novels like Windley’s offer a deeper, more thought-provoking examination of a time that is on the cusp of slipping from modern memory. As the number of people who lived through the atrocities dwindles, well-written books like Midnight Train to Prague are a reminder to the rest of us that we must never forget.”—Quill & Quire
Praise for Homeschooling
“Carol Windley’s writing has a unique power, a perfect combination of delicacy, intensity, and fearless imagination.”—Alice Munro
“Windley’s writing is calm and at times hypnotic, and her prose rhythms paint pictures of their own; she knows how to create the restful quiet of gentle waves breaking on a beach . . . startlingly lovely.”—Seattle Times
“Hints of Henry James . . . the opening lines of the astonishing title story are a high-wire act of narrative prestidigitation, mimicking the fault lines of memory and the compensatory gift of reinvention.”—Elle
“Language is wielded like a slender blade in these stories . . . swiftly piercing a perception and pinning it to the page.”—Boston Globe
“Beautiful, haunting stories—intelligent, heartfelt, and true.”—Alice Hoffman
Carol Windley’s writing has a unique power, a perfect combination of delicacy, intensity and fearless imagination.
Compelling, thought-provoking, emotionally rich . . . A powerful illustration of the storyteller’s art.
Mesmerizing . . . [Windley’s] characters are Chekhovian idealists and dreamers, refugees from the counterculture or from broken homes, actual and psychological orphans trying to reform themselves into new kinds of families . . . [and] what elevates [Windley] as a writer is her struggle to find a meaning in [those] characters’ fates, to discover their moral essence and, sometimes, even a magical truth.
[An] elegant collection . . . Windley’s writing is calm and at times hypnotic, and her prose rhythms paint pictures of their own; she knows how to create the restful quiet of gentle waves breaking on a beach. And her images, often occurring in the context of dreams, can be startlingly lovely.
Carol Windley’s short stories are impossible to put down. The scope of the subject matter is riveting: the world of the artist, the complexities of family relationships, and the innocence of childhood are written with a sure and deft hand. The characters are distinct and unforgettable, drawn with deep emotional roots, while the places they inhabit are described with wonder and truth. Moment by moment, Ms. Windley has written a masterful collection.
[Home Schooling] is as delicate as it is intelligent. . . . An exceptional collection of beautiful words and resonant insights. Every single story is worthy of reading, and once read, returned to, whether for ambience or intelligence of thought or language. Windley’s gift with narrative and images gives truly inspired meaning to the phrase ‘creative writing.’
Beautiful, haunting stories—intelligent, heartfelt, and true.
Home Schooling is a beautiful collection, full of sensitivity and utterly devoid of slick sentimentality. The stories are painstakingly realistic, conveying many facets of the family experience. . . . Windley’s fluid yet precise style captures the essence of the characters and their situations with immense grace.
Language is wielded like a slender blade in these stories by the Canadian author Carol Windley, swiftly piercing a perception and pinning it to the page.
"A compelling historical novel that is well worth reading."
The families in Carol Windley’s remarkable story collection are as unsettled and moody as the wind-blasted landscape that shelters and confounds them. . . . [Windley] is deeply in tune with her characters, their dilemmas, their petulance, and the peculiar grace that allows them to accept, even sometimes to applaud, how far they’ve come . . . A haunting book that deserves our attention.
"Its tale of a comfortable life upended by extraordinary circumstances is sure to resonate now more than ever.
Windley’s characters in Home Schooling are burdened and shaped by their secrets, so much so that they often fail to travel well through daily life. The landscape of the Northwest where Windley lives—that transparent air and those watchful dark trees—provides the perfect setting for these incandescent stories . . . Here, even the mystery of life’s slow, sure passing provides action to move a plot forward.
Moving back and forth in time, Windley zeros in on life-changing moments witnessed in different ways, as if seen through different lenses. A provocative collection from a writer in complete sync with her characters.
[Carol Windley’s] tales emit moments of sudden radiance that unmask narrative mysteries while wrapping them ever more tightly around their outcomes. . . . [A] book of pure magic.
The families in Carol Windley’s remarkable story collection are as unsettled and moody as the wind-blasted landscape that shelters and confounds them. . . . [Windley] is deeply in tune with her characters, their dilemmas, their petulance, and the peculiar grace that allows them to accept, even sometimes to applaud, how far they’ve come . . . A haunting book that deserves our attention.
Windley’s characters in Home Schooling are burdened and shaped by their secrets, so much so that they often fail to travel well through daily life. The landscape of the Northwest where Windley lives—that transparent air and those watchful dark trees—provides the perfect setting for these incandescent stories . . . Here, even the mystery of life’s slow, sure passing provides action to move a plot forward.
Moving back and forth in time, Windley zeros in on life-changing moments witnessed in different ways, as if seen through different lenses. A provocative collection from a writer in complete sync with her characters.
10/01/2020
A fateful 1927 train journey with her mother introduces Natalia to several people who will be influential in her life, including a female doctor called to assist a sick man and a dashing motorist whom Natalia spies from the train window. She soon learns the motorist is Miklos Count Andorjan, a journalist who also owns a large estate in Hungary. Marriage to Miklos allows Natalia a welcome escape from her flighty, immature mother, but the arrival of World War II forces Natalia and Miklos apart. When her path crosses in Prague with that of the doctor's young daughter, Anna, the two women's stories intertwine. VERDICT In her second novel (following 1998's Breathing Underwater and two story collections), Canadian writer Windley delivers well-researched descriptions of daily life in 1920s-40s Eastern Europe that will appeal to readers who enjoy immersive scene setting. The number of characters and the frequent jumps between them give the book a slightly crowded feel that is particularly noticeable in the first half, but the second half is more consistently engaging. Recommended for those readers who can't get enough of World War II historical fiction, particularly for those interested in civilians' experiences in Eastern Europe.—Mara Bandy Fass, Champaign P.L., IL
Narrator Kate Reading’s tone and pacing are perfect for this complex drama spanning the war-torn twentieth century. A delayed train journey in 1927 from Berlin to Prague intertwines the lives of Natalia Faber; her unpredictable mother, Beatriz; journalist Miklós Andorján; and Dr. Magdalena Schaeffer. The stranded strangers begin friendships that last decades, through WWII and its aftermath, withstanding even the cruelest of Nazi atrocities. Reading is a caring, sensitive guide who creates convincing relationships as the story reveals long-buried secrets. She creates real people among the abundance of characters, using believable accents, leading listeners down winding city streets and taking them to country spas, while smoothly navigating characters’ vivid, often painful, memories. Reading’s performance enhances this historical reflection on an era humanity must never forget. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
2020-09-02
A 1927 train journey from Berlin to Prague becomes a pivotal life-changing experience for a wealthy German widow and her daughter in award-winning Canadian author Windley’s first novel since Breathing Under Water (1998).
Sixteen-year-old Natalia Faber is pulled out of her convent boarding school to serve as her idiosyncratic and narcissist mother Beatriz’s traveling companion. When their train to Prague is delayed by a flooded branch line, Natalia volunteers to watch the young son of Czech doctor Magdalena Schaefferová as she attends a sick passenger. Later arriving at a spa on the shore of Lake Hévíz in Hungary, the Fabers meet Miklós Andorján, a Hungarian count and journalist, and his on-again, off-again love interest, Zita Kuznetsova, whom Natalia recognizes as the occupants of a speeding blue car she had admired from the train. Not long after, the impulsive Beatriz takes off with Zita for the Dalmatian coast. Out of this inauspicious beginning, a romance between Natalia and Miklós eventually blossoms, and they marry, splitting their time between Berlin and a rural Hungarian estate. But World War II separates them when Miklós heads to Russia to report on the Eastern Front. Believing her husband’s promise that they would reunite in Prague in the spring of 1942, Natalia goes there to wait for him and meets Anna, the 13-year-old daughter of Dr. Schaefferová. Both get caught up in the brutality of the Nazi occupation. Like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, Windley’s ambitious novel, switching points of view among Natalia, Anna, and, briefly, Miklós, vividly captures the devastating losses that war inflicts on ordinary people. But in trying to cover so much history across three different countries, it also feels crammed with too many contrived coincidences and sketchily drawn people (a cast of characters to keep track of all these secondary players would have been helpful).
A flawed but haunting and beautifully detailed story of love, loss, and survival during some of history's darkest hours.
