Star 111
By Lutz Seiler
These days, it’s hard to envision what Seiler’s translator, Tess Lewis, calls “the heady atmosphere of hope and disorientation” that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Luckily, Seiler’s STAR 111 (New York Review Books, 496 pp., paperback, $19.95) brings it all vividly back. An autobiographical picaresque, his novel reconstructs the exhilarating yet often terrifying experiences of individual East Germans in that brief period between the collapse of the Communist regime and reunification. Its central character, a 26-year-old aspiring poet, drifts through East Berlin’s anarchic underground squatter scene even as his parents abandon their home in Thuringia for a refugee camp in the West. All three find that freedom is a frustratingly vague concept, requiring constant improvisation. But what choice do they have, fleeing the ruins of an “abruptly obsolete, discontinued life”?
The Last Whaler
By Cynthia Reeves
The discontinuity in THE LAST WHALER (Regal House, 326 pp., paperback, $20.95) is both personal and professional. Set mainly in Svalbard, an international no man’s land between northern Norway and the North Pole, the novel juxtaposes the grief-stricken testimony of a widowed former whaler with letters written by his botanist wife roughly a decade earlier — souvenirs of the winter of 1937-38, when they became stranded at a remote whaling station, cut off from the outside world as it teetered on the brink of war. Each narrative celebrates, in its own fashion, an icy landscape filled with enchantment and danger, even as it drifts toward an indictment of the slaughter that has upset the balance of nature. Each is also a wrenching account of good intentions gone horribly awry. In the endless dark of the polar winter, a journey meant to heal a marriage becomes its undoing.
Pearly Everlasting
By Tammy Armstrong
Don’t be put off by the odd title of Armstrong’s latest novel. PEARLY EVERLASTING (Harper, 352 pp., $28.99) is named for its beguiling tomboy narrator, who in turn is named for a plant found in the New Brunswick woods. The main action takes place during the Great Depression, in and around the province’s logging camps, as Armstrong’s teenage heroine embarks on a series of adventures aimed at protecting her “brother,” Bruno, the small black bear (“more sheepdog than old boar”) that’s been raised alongside her since they were infants. Armstrong’s novel was inspired by a photograph, taken in 1903, of a woman in a lumber camp in Maine, posing as she nursed both her newborn daughter and an orphaned bear cub.
Shy Creatures
By Clare Chambers
The origins of Chambers’s SHY CREATURES (Mariner, 400 pp., $30) can be found in the true story of a 40-year-old English recluse discovered in the winter of 1952 in a house where his elderly aunt had been hiding him for 25 years. Chambers builds her version of this tale with layers of inventively meshed storytelling, gradually scrolling back to the late 1930s. Tasked with unraveling the mystery behind her new patient’s confinement, with helping “this hidden man emerge,” is an art therapist at a progressive mid-1960s psychiatric hospital whose romance with a married colleague offers a different slant on the personal dangers of deception. Entwining these present and past narratives, Chambers poignantly evokes the consequences of certain “terribly British qualities — shame, silence, avoidance of unpleasantness.”
The Wildes
By Louis Bayard
THE WILDES (Algonquin, 304 pp., $29) focuses on the consequences of Oscar Wilde’s scandalous downfall — not on the playwright himself, but on his wife and two sons. The opening scenes, with the as-yet-intact family on holiday in Norfolk in the summer of 1892, deliver a wonderfully witty drawing-room drama that descends into something darker with the sudden arrival of Lord Alfred Douglas. The novel will circle back to that marital implosion, but first we’re transported to Liguria in 1897, where the invalid Constance Wilde lives in exile under an assumed name. Then it’s on to the trenches of World War I France, eavesdropping while the Wildes’ emotionally stifled elder son reluctantly tends to a shellshocked aristocratic comrade, and later to 1920s Soho, where the youngest Wilde, subsisting on random translation work and his dead father’s royalties, comes face to face with the man who, as his mother once put it, “set off an explosion that never stops exploding.”
The Housekeeper’s Secret
By Iona Grey
The upstairs-downstairs historical novel is practically a genre in itself. THE HOUSEKEEPER’S SECRET (St. Martin’s, 368 pp., $29), which transports us to the Derbyshire countryside in 1911, has all the right elements: an isolated and slightly seedy 50-room mansion, a beautiful housekeeper who looks way too refined for her station, a suspiciously eager new footman, various superstitious maids and a strangely silent local boy, as well as an arrogant, recently installed heir, determined to make the most of his mousy bride’s fortune. Add the servants’ whispers about an unsolved disappearance at a long-ago shooting party and you have a plot Daphne du Maurier would have applauded.
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