Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright

by Justine Saracen

Overview

Twelve years of terror end with a world in flames. Behind filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's stirring footage of a million joyous patriots, the horror of Nazi Germany unfolds. It engulfs Katja Sommer, a "good German" who discovers honor in treason; Frederica Brandt, active in the highest circles of power; Rudi Lamm, homosexual camp survivor and forced SS killer; and Peter Arnhelm, a half- Jewish terrorist. Under the scrutiny of the familiar monsters of the Third Reich, these four struggle for life, decency, and each other. Love does not conquer all, but it's better than going to hell alone.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014736770
Publisher:	Bold Strokes Books
Publication date:	03/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	907 KB

About the Author

After years of ‘professing’ at universities and writing for international literary journals, Justine Saracen began creating from the imagination and the heart. Trips to Egypt, Morocco and Palestine inspired the Ibis Prophecy books, which move from Ancient Egyptian theology to the bloodthirsty Christianity of the Crusades. The playful first novel, The 100th Generation, was a finalist in the Queerlit Competition and the Ann Bannon Reader’s Choice award. The sequel, 2007 Lammy nominated Vulture’s Kiss, focuses on the first crusade and vividly dramatizes the dangers of militant religion.

The expatriate Brussels-based writer, then moved her literary spotlight up a few centuries, to the Renaissance and a few kilometers to the north, to Rome. Sistine Heresy, conjures up an GLBT and thoroughly blasphemic backstory to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. The newly released work quickly sold out at the 2009 Palm Springs Lesbian Book Festival.

Mephisto Aria, in contrast, deals with devilish things, in a WWII thriller that has one eye on the Faust story and the other on the world of opera. In Berlin, staggering toward recovery after WWII, a Russian soldier passes on his brilliance, but also his mortal guilt, to his opera singer daughter.

Lest anyone think that Saracen is done confronting religion, her current work in progress is about a transvestite in Venice who meets the terrors of the Inquisition and finds out something important -- one might almost say appalling -- about God. Scanning a fictional eye along the centuries, Saracen has a self-declared mission, to repopulate history with “the likes of us,” by which she appears to mean people who, not by their acts, but by their very lives, still scare the ignorant.