08/26/2013
Shreve’s 17th novel is a tragic yet hopeful story of love, memory, loss, and rebuilding. A young woman wakes up with amnesia in a battlefield hospital tent in Marne, France, in 1916. She thinks her name is Stella Bain, and she thinks she knows how to nurse and drive an ambulance. As she recovers, she returns to duty in this new environment, caring for the wounded and dying. When she arrives in the city exhausted and destitute, she’s discovered in a park by a doctor’s wife, who takes her in. The doctor, Augustus Bridge, is a cranial surgeon with an interest in psychiatry. Stella becomes a “quasi-patient”; he finds a way to get her into the Admiralty, and, when a former friend recognizes her by name, her memories return, including the fact that she has children—and the reason why she left them. The amnesia and its cause are only part of the story; the lack of understanding at the time of the consequences of witnessing the horrors of war, for both men and women, also plays a key role. The novel is both tender and harsh, and the only false note is the use of present tense, which prevents the reader from being pulled in more closely. Shreve’s thoughtful, provocative, historical tale has modern resonance. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME Entertainment. (Nov.)
Stella Bain
Narrated by Hope Davis
Anita ShreveUnabridged — 6 hours, 56 minutes
Stella Bain
Narrated by Hope Davis
Anita ShreveUnabridged — 6 hours, 56 minutes
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Overview
When an American woman, Stella Bain, is found suffering from severe shell shock in an exclusive garden in London, surgeon August Bridge and his wife selflessly agree to take her in.
A gesture of goodwill turns into something more as Bridge quickly develops a clinical interest in his houseguest. Stella had been working as a nurse's aide near the front, but she can't remember anything prior to four months earlier when she was found wounded on a French battlefield.
In a narrative that takes us from London to America and back again, Shreve has created an engrossing and wrenching tale about love and the meaning of memory, set against the haunting backdrop of a war that destroyed an entire generation.
Editorial Reviews
"Touching, heartbreaking, sometimes so vivid you can almost feel the fear." ---Karen Campbell, Boston Globe
"Spare, elegant....Shreve's fans will appreciate her keen understanding of women's struggles to live life on their own terms." ---Helen Rogan, People
"A must-read." ---Steph Opitz, Marie Claire
"Astonishing....Brilliant and unexpected....Shreve is a versatile writer, depicting the brutality of battle just as compellingly as she does the early stages of love. She had me rooting for Stella's happiness the whole way through and left me completely satisfied at the end." ---Diane Colvard, Real Simple
"Vivid prose.... The true power of Stella Bain lies not in what is said, but in what is left unsaid. The silences are complex: silences within relationship and silences that come from misunderstanding the complicated mental and emotional consequences of war. And though the story is dark, its resolution is hopeful and nostalgic." ---Natalie Bakopoulos, San Francisco Chronicle
"An intriguing character study that delivers compelling mystery without melodrama. Shreve offers a fresh, feminine twist on a topic that's much in vogue lately-World War I.... Shreve cleverly and movingly shifts between Stella's two lives, as we learn who she really is. A custody battle, a horrible case of wartime disfigurement, and even questions of women's rights emerge in this spare but involving novel....Those who read Shreve's 2003 novel, All He Ever Wanted, will get an unexpected thrill when they put the pieces together." ---Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today
"Stella Bain Shreve returns to what she does best-describing the thoughts, actions, and feelings of an unconventional woman....As Shreve peels back the layers of memory and exposes the real woman in Stella, she creates a compulsively readable novel....In Stella Bain, Shreve's writing is spare and luminous, much like her protagonist. She can evoke an intense feeling in just a few words....The extensive dialogue and courtroom testimony move the story along swiftly, and in sections the book reads like a play. Although the story takes place in, variously, the late 19th Century and the first decades of the 20th Century, Shreve has woven in themes that readers in this century will have no trouble recognizing as worthy and current." ---Laura Eggertson, Toronto Star
"As always, master storyteller Anita Shreve spins a spell-binding web of a tale, guaranteed to snare her readers into turning pages until three in the morning." ---Terry Miller Shannon, Book Reporter
"Compelling....Shreve infuses Stella Bain with a warmth and intelligence that has been a hallmark of her 17 previous novels." ---Carol Iaciofano, NPR
"The gripping, touching tale of a shell-shocked American in post-WWI London." ---Good Housekeeping
"Shreve writes tightly plotted page-turners." ---Catherine Elsworth, Goodreads
"An exemplary addition to Shreve's already impressive oeuvre." ---Kirkus Reviews
"A tragic yet hopeful story of love, memory, loss, and rebuilding.... Shreve's thoughtful, provocative historical tale has modern resonance." ---Publishers Weekly
"Stella's journey of self-discovery allows us to encounter the horrors of the first World War, groundbreaking treatments in psychotherapy, early acknowledgments of domestic violence, and the glimmer of first-wave feminism....An improbably woman of mystery." ---Alice Short, Los Angeles Times
"[Rescue] is Shreve at her best, looking at a family tragedy and the events that caused those involved to reevaluate their past and to find the courage to possibly change their lives."
PRAISE FOR RESCUE:
"Fans of Anita Shreve will likely devour this new novel..."
"Riveting....The prose is characteristically Shreve-spare."
"Engrossing...With the insistent thrum of life-and-death EMT calls as background, Shreve's vividly told tale captures the deep-seated fears of mortality and loneliness that can drive us to test the bounds of family and forgiveness."
PRAISE FOR RESCUE:
"A beautiful novel about the limits of forgiveness and the fragility of family. Pitch-perfect all the way to the final line."
02/01/2014
In a hospital tent in Marne, France, during World War I, a woman regains consciousness, unable to remember who she is. She believes her name is Stella Bain and that something at the Admiralty in London will shed light on her situation. When she suddenly regains her memory in London, a host of disturbing events are revealed involving violence, deception, lies, and scandal. She returns home to unravel the tangle that had been her life. Shreve conjures a world where psychiatric therapy is new, shell shock is a little-understood consequence of war, and women have very few legal rights. The outcome of the story is predictable, but this audiobook is well read by Hope Davis. VERDICT Recommended. ["With period pieces on television like Downton Abbey and Call the Midwife so popular, Shreve has chosen a timely setting. And as usual her plotlines and domestic drama do not disappoint," read the review of the Little, Brown hc, LJ 11/1/13.]—Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence
Stella Bain awakens in a field hospital in Marne, France, in 1916 with no memory of her identity other than her name and the fact that she had been an ambulance driver at the front. Narrator Hope Davis brings an almost painful clarity to Stella’s conviction that she must have done something terrible before she got the shrapnel wounds that hospitalized her. Davis makes each new memory revelation significant. The shock in her voice is palpable when Stella learns who she really is, and she’s completely convincing as memories overwhelm, filling in Stella’s blank spaces. Anita Shreve’s books often begin with an intriguing premise that somehow slides into another, completely different, direction before the conclusion. Here Davis makes Shreve’s plot turns and surprises credible without resorting to melodrama. An engrossing listen. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
2013-09-01
A wife risks every chance of domestic happiness by heading to the front long before America's entry into the Great War. A woman awakens in a field hospital in Marne, France, in 1916. Fragments of memory surface: She recalls that she was serving near the front as a nurse's aide and ambulance driver before suffering a shrapnel wound and shell shock and that her name is Stella Bain. Driven to seek answers about her identity from the Admiralty in London, she travels there and, ill, is taken in by August Bridge, a cranial surgeon, and his wife, Lily. Experimenting with the new field of psychoanalysis, August strives to restore Stella's memory: She draws a series of scenes that provide clues, not least to the fact that she is an accomplished artist. At the Admiralty, she is recognized by Samuel, an officer there, and her past floods back--she is Etna Van Tassel, not Stella Bain. A flashback reveals that Etna and Samuel were young lovers in New Hampshire and that she begged Samuel, in front of his brother Phillip, not to marry another, to no avail. She married a dour Dutch professor, until a baseless scandal he fomented involving their teenage daughter and Phillip drove Etna--and Phillip--to France as a volunteer. Phillip and Etna's affinity blossoms into affection as the duo, both ambulance drivers, steal moments together amid the carnage and horror of trench warfare. Although the novel's structure is somewhat disjointed, and the preliminary amnesiac chapters seem gratuitous in light of the full revelations that follow, the characters are well-drawn and sympathetic. Many surprises are in store. An exemplary addition to Shreve's already impressive oeuvre.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940173756756 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hachette Audio |
| Publication date: | 11/12/2013 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Stella Bain
By Anita Shreve, Hope Davis
Hachette Audio
Copyright © 2013 Anita Shreve Hope DavisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-316-09886-1
CHAPTER 1
Marne, March 1916
Sunrise glow through canvas panels. Foul smell of gas gangrene. Men moaning all around her. Pandemonium and chaos.
She floats inside a cloud. Cottony, a little dingy. Pinpricks of light summon her to wakefulness. She drifts, and then she sleeps.
Distinct sounds of metal on metal, used instruments tossed into a pan. She tries to remember why she lies on a cot, enclosed within panels of canvas, a place where men who die are prepared for burial away from the rest of the wounded, a task she has performed any number of times.
She glances down and finds that she is wearing mauve men's pajamas. Why do her feet hurt?
A small piece of cloth with a question mark on it is pinned to a uniform hanging from a hook. For several minutes, she studies the uniform before realizing that she does not know her own name. She receives this fact with growing anxiety.
The name Lis floats lightly into her thoughts. But she does not think Lis is her name. Elizabeth ...? No. Ella ...? Ellen ...? Possibly, though there ought to be a sibilant. She ponders the empty space where a name should be.
The name Stella bubbles up into her consciousness. Can Stella be it? She examines the letters as they appear in her mind, and the more she studies them, the more certain she is that Stella is correct.
Again, she drifts into a half sleep. When she comes to, she cannot remember the name she has decided upon. She lets her mind empty, and, gradually, it returns.
Stella.
Such a small thing.
Such a big thing.
Stella has no idea where she has come from. She senses it might be an unhappy place, a door she might not want to open. But no one's entire past can be unhappy, can it? It might contain unhappy events or a tendency toward melancholy, but the whole cannot be miserable.
All around her, the hum of flies and the beat of fast footsteps. Orders are shouted; a new batch of wounded is coming in; the staff will want her bed, of course they will. There is nothing wrong with her, and she has simply been allowed to sleep a long time.
She rubs her feet together. A sharp pain through the muffling of bandages. How has she injured her feet?
A panel is moved aside, and she hears a woman speak in French. Seconds later, a nurse, a nun, enters the small canvas compartment. As she moves toward the bed, she looms large in her starched uniform and wimple. She scrutinizes Stella's eyes, scanning, the patient knows, for dilated pupils. "You are British?" the sister asks.
"I am not sure," Stella answers.
"You have been unconscious for two days," the sister explains, stepping back and fussing with the sheets as she slides Stella's feet from under the covers. "Your feet had bits of shrapnel in them when you arrived. Someone with a cart left you outside the tent in the middle of the night. I should like to examine your feet."
This is someone else's story, Stella thinks, not hers.
"What is your name?"
"Stella." She pauses. "Where am I?"
"Marne."
"Marne is in France?"
"Yes," the sister answers, pursing her mouth. "My name is Sister Luke. I am British, but almost everyone else at the camp is French. We believe your boots blew off when you were knocked unconscious by the first shell and that a second shell injured your feet. You had not a scratch on you otherwise, apart from some bruises from falling."
"Will I be able to walk?" Stella asks.
Sister Luke studies her. "I think you are American."
"Am I?"
"From your accent. But you were found in a British VAD uniform."
Stella cannot explain this.
"You are a VAD?"
"I don't know."
Stella can see that the sister is annoyed and has other, more pressing matters to attend to.
"But I know how to drive an ambulance," she blurts out.
Is this true? If not, why does she think it is?
"You know this, and yet you do not know your posting?" the sister asks with barely concealed disbelief.
Yes, the paradox is bewildering but does not seem urgent. Beyond the canvas, Stella knows, everything is urgent.
The sister moves toward the opening in the compartment. "Apart from your feet, I can find nothing wrong with you. You will have them examined and dressed on a regular basis. Then you will rest and eat and drink while we ascertain your identification. We will contact all the nearby hospital camps. You cannot have come very far. When your feet are better, you can work. Perhaps we will see if you can drive that ambulance after all. In the meantime, you are to remain here. What is your last name?"
Stella simply shakes her head.
Orders are given, and a nurse's aide arrives with a tray. The dressing of Stella's wounds is more painful than she would have thought possible. The aide, who looks exhausted, helps Stella drink two glasses of water. Stella feels sorry for the young woman and does not ask questions because she knows the effort it will take to answer them.
Stella's last name comes to her the way a bird takes flight. She tells the aide, "I am Stella Bain."
When the aide leaves, Stella closes her eyes and then opens them. She repeats this exercise several times. But no matter how often she does it, she cannot remember what regiment she was attached to or what she was doing on a battlefield.
A month later, Stella has recovered from her wounds and serves as a nurse's aide in a French uniform. Again, she puzzles over the way her skills have returned to her, even though she does not know where she learned them.
Stella is appalled by her surroundings: the soil thick with manure; mud-laced wounds causing suppurating infections; compound fractures imposing a death sentence. A swab of Lysol along with gauze dipped in iodine is all the medicine on offer. A gas-gangrenous wound, not to be confused with the effect of poisoned gas, balloons up to grotesque proportions. Stella watches a doctor play an idle beat upon a man's flesh with his fingers. The sight is awful, the sound hollow. Almost all the men die.
Sometimes, the doctors' screams are louder than the patients'. The surgeon's job is beyond belief, a hell on earth worse than any hell imagined. Stella wants to know how many of them go mad, all sensibility and religion violently stripped away during the endless succession of amputations.
Always look a man in the eye, no matter how terrible the wound. This the English sister teaches, orders, her to do. The wounded's journey is long: from the trenches of no-man's-land to the aid post to the field dressing station to the casualty-clearing station, only to die on the train on the way to the base hospital.
In her off-hours, Stella mends tears in her skirt, brushes mud off her hem, and searches for lice in the seams of her clothing. She washes collars and cuffs and the cloth of her cap, and if there is water left over, she tries to clean her body.
One day, she asks the sister on duty if she might have a piece of paper and a pencil. In her tent, Stella begins to sketch what she can see around her: a lantern, a canvas table, a cot in the corner. Her roommate, Jeanne, catches her at this activity and marvels at Stella's ability. In broken English and using a kind of sign language, she asks if Stella will draw her portrait so that she might send it back to her family. Jeanne has hollow eyes and a vocation. As she draws the young woman, Stella wants to ask her how her religion has survived the sights they have both witnessed, but Stella's grasp of French is not good enough for any sort of meaningful conversation.
When Jeanne brings a fellow aide to the tent and asks Stella if she will draw her friend's portrait, Stella agrees on the condition that Jeanne find her more paper and pencils and a knife for sharpening the pencils. This Jeanne happily does. Jeanne's friend insists on paying Stella for her sketch. Gradually, a number of nurses and their aides line up to have their portraits done as well.
But between the portraits, when Stella is alone, the private drawings she makes disturb her. She sketches the exteriors of unknown houses, surrounded by grotesque trees and bushes. When she tries again, the drawings are nearly the same, but the atmosphere of claustrophobia grows even more pronounced. The sketches produce a keen sense of distress, but she cannot stop herself from continuing to make them.
Stella does not know how she came by her skill at drawing. It seems to have appeared simply out of a desire to do so.
The English sister must have remembered Stella's statement that she can drive an ambulance, for she receives her first assignment on a June night.
"Over and up," the French orderly beside her says. The ambulance bucks, but does not stall. Stella has to feel her way along the road, since no lights can be used. Her eyes strain and water. In the distance, rockets throw a greenish light over the countryside.
Stella screams when a shell bursts two hundred feet ahead. First, a large splash of earth, and then a ball of smoke, which drifts away. The orderly swears, French words that she understands. The orderly is fluent in English, which is, Stella supposes, the reason he has been assigned to her.
"It's going to get rough," the man explains. "Especially when we pull in. That is where we are most vulnerable. As soon as I jump off, you turn the truck around and keep the engine running. Someone will help me load. When I pound the back here, you start driving, no matter what is happening. You find a way to get back."
Physical fear begins to climb Stella's spine, and yet she has done this before, has she not? Her hand shakes on the gearshift. She squeezes her shoulder blades together, expecting a direct hit to the Croix Rouge symbol on the roof. She has no idea where the road begins. She struggles to see the slightest indication of tracks, but smoke clouds the path. How will she find her way back to camp with the wounded inside? Regulations prohibit her from stopping at any point, even if the men behind her start to shout.
She senses the bump of each stretcher as it is loaded into the back of the bus. She waits for the pounding on the wooden panel.
Stella does not know how many are in the back, how badly wounded they are. She cannot even be sure it is the orderly himself who has signaled to her. She wishes he were up front so that she could talk to him.
"Left," she says aloud to herself as she finds and follows the tracks. And later, "Slow down."
When she arrives back at camp, she slides like a reptile from the driver's seat. Despite the cold, she has perspired through to her coat. She counts the wounded as they are unloaded. She is struck by their apparent freedom from pain. Stranger still, she can hear one of them whistling. She feels stronger and lighter than she has in months.
One day, walking through the camp, Stella hears a man curse the institution that assigned his brother to a ship that sank. Her mind snags on the word Admiralty in the sentence. She puzzles over it so much in the days that follow that Admiralty becomes a kind of mythic goal, a monolith drawing her toward it. She believes that she will one day reach it, and she hopes that once she sees the building or the landscape, she will remember why it seems to be so important. But how strange, because to her knowledge she has never been in England. Can her quest be the result of an event in her former life?
Admiralty hums in its own layer, the one behind the present moment and before the void that is her memory. A word. A title. A note. It presses and troubles her, even when she actively tries to think of something else.
Stella learns that the Admiralty, headquarters to the British Royal Navy, stands in central London. She begins to cherish the word because she believes it comes from her previous life, perhaps the first chink in the armor of her inner mind, where memory and identity lie. Has she ever worked at the Admiralty? Lived close to it? Did she once have a husband who worked there? The notion threatens her, because she cannot imagine having forgotten something as basic as a man she loved and the intimacy they shared. Often she studies her fingers, searching for a tiny circle that might signal the previous presence of a wedding band. But she has found nothing. In the privacy of her tent, shortly after her arrival, she conducted a physical examination. A husband or a lover is a possibility.
Throughout the summer, Stella's life consists of tending to the wounded, driving an ambulance, and drawing on paper with a pencil. In this way, she sometimes forgets that she cannot remember.
In October, Stella is granted leave. She thinks this might be her one chance to get to England. She must find the Admiralty and discover its importance. Jeanne tells her she should go to Paris.
Stella asks for and is given a canvas satchel in which she packs her British uniform, her sketches, and the money she has earned from making portraits of nurses and their aides.
Once in Paris, she catches a train for the coast, where, she has heard, English hospital ships carrying wounded men are setting out for home. But the train, due to heavy bombardment, has to stop before it reaches Étaples. Even from a distance of ten miles, the shelling can be heard. The hospital personnel are urged to stay in their seats; the train will be rerouted.
With her satchel, Stella slips from the train and makes her way into the woods. If her exit has been seen, will they bother to look for her? She cannot imagine a doctor or a train conductor trying to find her. Stella remains, for the moment, a stateless woman in a lawless country.
The journey through the forest is arduous and frightening, but gradually the woods thin out to reveal the coastal village. Along the way, she encounters a chaos such as she has never seen before. She begins to cough, whether from the smoke or illness she cannot tell. In Étaples, Stella discovers that the large Red Cross hospital ship to which the wounded were headed has partially sunk.
She ducks inside a tent and changes into her British VAD uniform. "I've lost my way," she tells the first official-looking British man she meets.
"They're using smaller ships now to get across the Channel. There's a dock at the eastern end you might try."
Stella locates a ship that was perhaps a ferry or a pleasure boat. There is no pleasure aboard it now. When she sees the cargo, she gasps. The wounded and the dead have not been separated. The calls of the injured sound as if they come from an underworld she has only dreamed about. Here and there, she observes nurse's aides like herself comforting men and applying dressings.
No one asks to see her identity card. No one cares. She does what she has been doing for months in Marne, tending to the wounded and assisting with operations that cannot wait until they reach the shore.
When in England, Stella boards a train with the most seriously hurt, the ones who might not, even with a doctor's ministrations, make it to Victoria station. En route, the men are sick and their bowels loosen. There is a priest on board to deliver last rites, and it is one of Stella's duties to make sure she can find the man at any given moment.
In London, Stella silently wishes the wounded well and then leaves them. Trading with the soldiers heading toward the front, she exchanges her French money for English money. Exhausted, Stella follows a crowd along what looks to be a main thoroughfare. She walks in a direction she thinks will lead to the Admiralty, but after a while senses that she has made a mistake. Finding herself on a narrow lane, she tries to retrace her steps. She walks without food or water, fingering the unfamiliar British coins inside her pocket. She moves forward until she can walk no more, but still she keeps trudging. She walks until she comes to a stop against a wrought-iron fence. A woman in a rose-colored suit asks her a question.
London, October 1916
A woman in a rose-colored suit, which strikes Stella as both odd and beautiful because she has seen little color on anyone in London, asks her if she is unwell.
"My name is Lily Bridge. From my window across the garden, I saw you leaning against the fence. Pardon my candor, but you seem to be overwrought."
Who, Stella would like to know, is not overwrought in this time and place?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stella Bain by Anita Shreve, Hope Davis. Copyright © 2013 Anita Shreve Hope Davis. Excerpted by permission of Hachette Audio.
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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