Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase

by Louise Walters Narrated by Anna Bentinck, Karen Cass

Overview

A heartbreaking and deeply compelling debut, Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase is a compulsive page-turner about thwarted love, dashed hopes, and family secrets-book-club fiction at its best.
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Roberta, a lonely thirty-four-year-old bibliophile, works at The Old and New Bookshop in England. When she finds a letter inside her centenarian grandmother's battered old suitcase that hints at a dark secret, her understanding of her family's history is completely upturned. Running alongside Roberta's narrative is that of her grandmother, Dorothy, as a forty-year-old childless woman desperate for motherhood during the early years of World War II. After a chance encounter with a Polish war pilot, Dorothy believes she's finally found happiness, but must instead make an unthinkable decision whose consequences forever change the framework of her family.
*
The parallel stories of Roberta and Dorothy unravel over the course of eighty years as they both make their own ways through secrets, lies, sacrifices, and love. Utterly absorbing, Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase is a spellbinding tale of two worlds, one shattered by secrets and the other by the truth.
*

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

A breathtaking, beautifully crafted tale of loves that survive secrets.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Musty books, unrequited love, and old family secrets combine to create a crackling multigenerational saga infused with passion, pathos, and evocative WWII-era historical detail. Plenty of book-club and cinematic potential in this irresistible page-turner.” — Booklist

“A solid debut . . . [that] may appeal to those who have also liked bookishly romantic stories such as Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society or Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry.” – Library Journal

“Dorothea’s story riveted me from the start. Walters . . . bring[s] both history and characters alive.” – Historical Novels Review

“A riveting debut with an impeccably researched past and charismatic present-day voices. Mrs. Sinclair’s Suitcase is like opening a literary treasure chest, full of sharp-edged gems glittering with all the beauty and heartache of humanity. You’re sure to carry this story with you wherever you go. I know I will.” —Sarah McCoy, author of the New York Times and international bestseller The Baker’s Daughter and The Mapmaker’s Children

“A moving reminder that history is not just a pageant of world-shaking events, but a weave of individual lives that are often as inspiring as they are tragic.” —David R. Gillham, author of the New York Times–bestseller City of Women

“Vivid and seductive, the tale begins in a blazing crash in World War II and twists through a tangle of mysterious circumstances, misunderstandings, and repressed desires. Irresistible . . .” —Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman, authors of the national bestseller Freud’s Mistress

“Like forgotten letters and photos tucked inside secondhand books, secrets hide within the pages of Mrs. Sinclair’s Suitcase. Louise Walters has crafted a heartbreaking story of love and all its faces.” —Jessica Brockmole, author of Letters from Skye

“Walters creates a totally absorbing world, and takes you right into the heart of her story. Beautifully done, and heartbreaking, too.” —Esther Freud, author of The Sea House and Hideous Kinky

“A heartbreaking tale of loss, missed chances, and enduring love.” —Good Housekeeping (UK)

“A first novel of great charm and assurance, beautifully told and utterly gripping.” —The Times (UK)

Booklist

Musty books, unrequited love, and old family secrets combine to create a crackling multigenerational saga infused with passion, pathos, and evocative WWII-era historical detail. Plenty of book-club and cinematic potential in this irresistible page-turner.

Library Journal

06/15/2015
Roberta works at the Old and New Bookshop, carefully saving the ephemera she discovers among the pages of the books she shelves. But nothing prepares her for what she finds in one of her grandmother's books: a letter from her grandfather, written a year after he was supposedly killed in World War II. Set in England, the story alternates chapters between Roberta's present-day problems and her grandmother Dorothea's more difficult wartime life. There are plenty of family secrets to uncover, with the reader given enough information to guess at the answers before Roberta figures them out. The historical details and characters are strong, but Roberta's story is less engaging. At times it's difficult to differentiate between characters; the wartime story and Roberta's quiet, genteel existence feel as though they belong to the past. VERDICT Touching on popular themes, both bookish and war related, this novel aims high but falls just short of the target. It's a solid debut, however, and may appeal to those who have also liked bookishly romantic stories such as Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society or Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. [See Prepub Alert, 2/9/15.]—Melanie Kindrachuk, Stratford P.L., Ont.

AUGUST 2015 - AudioFile

In alternating chapters, listeners meet 34-year-old Roberta and her 110-year-old grandmother, Dorothea Pietrykowski—or is it Dorothy Sinclair? Anna Bentinck and Karen Cass are the spellbinding narrators of this delightful novel. They’re both equally gifted at capturing the mysterious ambience of the story, as well as every emotion—from Dorothea’s unhappy marriage, devastating miscarriages, and all-consuming love affair with a Polish pilot during WWII to Roberta’s loneliness in the present and desire to discover the truth about her family history. The dual narration is seamless and thoroughly engaging from start to finish. M.M.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2015-04-30
Letters and postcards once used as bookmarks flutter out of used books, forgotten signs of liaisons. Roberta treasures books so much that she pines away in her beloved job at Old and New Bookshop, watching Philip, her boss and the man she can't yet admit to herself that she loves, take the beautiful Jenna as his lover. But secrets begin to spill out of the books—secrets that will change her understanding of the past and hopes for the future. One fateful day, Roberta's father, John, brings in an old suitcase labeled "Mrs. D. Sinclair," filled with her grandmother Dorothea Pietrykowski's old books. Between the pages, Roberta discovers a letter dated Feb. 8, 1941, signed by her grandfather Jan Pietrykowski, warning Dorothea that what she is about to do will dishonor her, imperil her very soul, and wrong some unnamed mother and child. If only Roberta could ask her grandmother or her father about the letter, but at 109, Dorothea has entered hospice care, and John's health is failing, as well. Meanwhile, Jenna confesses to a bewildered Roberta that she's pregnant with a child fathered by her ex-boyfriend. Walters' debut novel nimbly weaves together Roberta's and Dorothea's stories—the reader almost expects to pull a shadowy missive from its spine. Roberta's life is a mess; she stifles her feelings for Philip, twisting her desires into a sad affair with a married man. But Dorothea's story is the stuff of films: disowned, disappointed in marriage, crushed by multiple miscarriages—Dorothea rises above it all to manage her own farmhouse, to take into her home two young women, part of the Women's Land Army, and to find new love with Jan, the dashing Polish Squadron Leader. A breathtaking, beautifully crafted tale of loves that survive secrets.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171992408
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/04/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
My dear Dorothea,

In wartime, people become desperate. We step outside

ourselves. The truth is, I love you and I am sorry that only now

do I own it. You love me. I will not forget the touch of your hand

on my head and on my neck when you thought I slept. The touch

of love, no longer imagined. Nobody will touch me like that

again. This I know. This is my loss.

Forgive me, Dorothea, for I cannot forgive you. What you do,

to this child, to this child’s mother, it is wrong. It is misplaced,

like me, forced out of my homeland, perhaps never to return.

You too will never return if you persist in this scheme. You will

persist. Yet even now it can be undone. But I know you will not

undo. Your soul will not return from this that you do. Please

believe me. In welcoming the one into your arms, you must lose

another. I cannot withstand. You know why.

I do not enjoy writing these words to you. Actually, I cry.

Once this war is finished—and it must finish—

we could have made a life together. To spend my life with you has become my

only great dream and desire. After our first meeting, as I rode

away on my bicycle, I knew you were as important to me as

water. I knew you were for all time, even as there is no time. I

thought of marriage within minutes of meeting you. But it

cannot be. You are an honorable woman, but this thing that

you do is beyond honor. You do so much to be good, yet you go

back on yourself, you invite dishonor. I cannot write clearly, but

you will understand. My truly beautiful Dorothea, despite

everything, our friendship must here end. I wish you all joy of

this world.

Yours,

Jan Pietrykowski

(I found this letter in a 1910 edition of The Infant’s Progress: From the Valley

of Destruction to Everlasting Glory. I placed the book on Philip’s desk for

pricing, and it went into the antiquarian books cabinet, priced at a modest £15.)

I clean books. I dust their spines, their pages, sometimes one at a time; painstaking, throat-catching work. I find things hidden in books: dried flowers, locks of hair, tickets, labels, receipts, invoices, photographs, postcards, all manner of cards. I find letters, unpublished works by the ordinary, the anguished, the illiterate. Clumsily written or eloquent, they are love letters, everyday letters, secret letters and mundane letters talking about fruit and babies and tennis matches, from people signing themselves as Marjorie or Jean. My boss, Philip, long used to such finds, is blasé and whatever he finds, he places aside for me to look at. You can’t keep everything, he reminds me. And, of course, he is right. But I can’t bring myself to dispose of these snippets and snapshots of lives that once meant (or still do mean) so much.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Louise Walters.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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