Publishers Weekly
For a novel with two main characters, logic dictates that each performer should take one of the leading roles to create a mini-cast production, but this audio proceeds the old-fashioned way, in tag-team style. Anne Flosnik, performing the first section set primarily in Germany after the Great War, has a brittle voice that takes some getting used to. Her range is dwarfed by the talented Michael Page, who picks up the story in London in 1944. Though narrating in a slightly British accent, Page captures the American cadences and personality of Charles/Claus with all his yearnings and ambivalence, and his Kate, the British-born woman at the heart of the first section, outshines Flosnik's interpretation. Despite the unevenness of the performances, Page's galvanizing narrative makes this well-researched historical novel worth sticking with. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 27). (June)
Kirkus Reviews
From the bloody aftermath of World War I to the somber streets of London under Nazi attack, this intelligent epic fuses romance, disaster, historical analysis and poetic observation. Kate Zweig's husband, a German surgeon, was blinded by a bomb on the eastern front in 1919, and when he died, Kate turned hard-and hardy. Griner (Collectors, 2001, etc.) examines divided loyalties and the exigencies of survival through the eyes of this English-born nurse-bold, beautiful, astute. Loyal to her husband in WWI, she'd witnessed horrors-a priest shot pointblank by marauding Reds; field hospital barbarism (bags of salt sewn into wounds). Then, in 1944 London, a new love arrives-Claus Murphy, American filmmaker of Irish and German descent. His complicated past includes being jailed as a traitor for making a movie about the American Revolution that, revealing real-life British atrocities, threatened the U.K./U.S. alliance. Claus suspects the refugee Kate of pro-Nazi sympathies (she decries the Allied bombing of German civilians) but is soon taken with her subtle and principled politics, courage and air of mysterious sadness. By night, he's an air warden, pulling bodies from the wreckage of bombed buildings; by day, for the Ministry of Information, he feeds the Nazis lies about D-Day and crafts British propaganda films. The two bond over tales of trauma: his dad, a shopkeeper beaten by anti-Kaiser goons; her vivid remembrance of wartime agony ("the sunken eyes and cyanotic lips of the cholera victims; the lilting bubble of typhus sufferers"). As the two connect, they negotiate the minefields of their histories-histories as messy and moving as those of all combat survivors. Complex, authentic andcompelling. Author tour to New York, Boston, Louisville, Lexington, Ky., Cincinnati, Dayton, Ohio
FEBRUARY 2010 - AudioFile
WWII atrocities are dramatized through the relationship between the English widow of a German surgeon and an exiled American with German roots. The lovers' terror, loyalties, and entanglements take place amid the appalling history that is woven into their daily lives. Anne Flosnik's crisp enunciation serves as a striking counterpoint to vivid descriptions of Nazi concentration camps and wartime battlefields. Her portrayals of Kate, the widow, and other characters are so realistic that they could be mistaken for the work of a full cast. Michael Page's bravery as Charles, the American, is audible through his stoic narration of the brutality he witnesses while spying for the British. The struggle for survival and the tension between collaboration and loyalty are the themes of this novel, which is reminiscent of the work of Graham Greene. A.W. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
