Love and Treasure
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
'A NOVEL TO LOVE AND TREASURE' PHILIPPA GREGORY
'REMARKABLE' MICHAEL ONDAATJE
'POIGNANTLY MOVING' JOYCE CAROL OATES
Salzburg, 1946. A fugitive train loaded with the plunder of a doomed people. A dazzling, jewel-encrusted, peacock-shaped pendant. And three men - an American lieutenant who fought in WWII, an Israeli-born dealer of Nazi plunder, and a pioneering psychiatrist in fin-de-siècle Budapest - who find their carefully-wrought lives turned upside-down by three fierce women, each locked in a struggle against her own history and the history of their times.
Spanning continents and a century marked by war and revolution, Love and Treasure is by turns funny and tragic, thrilling and harrowing, mapping the darkness of a shattered Europe against the heartbreak of a modern New Yorker. Told through the prism of the peacock pendant, the novel charts the ebb and flow of history, fate and fortune from 1914 Budapest to present-day New York.
And at the centre of Love and Treasure, nested like a photograph hidden in a locket, a mystery: where does the worth of a people and its treasures truly lie? What is the value of a gift, when giver and recipient have been lost - of a love offering when the beloved is no more?
'AN AMBITIOUS, PERCEPTIVE NOVEL' GUARDIAN
'A WONDERFULLY IMAGINATIVE WRITER' WASHINGTON POST
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This lush, multigenerational tale by Waldman (Bad Mother) of loves lost and found begins at a portentous historical starting point: the so-called Hungarian Gold Train. Waldman traces the path of a single pendant taken from this notorious shipment of Nazi-confiscated treasures, which the U.S. seized at the end of WWII but largely failed to return to the original owners, many of them Hungarian Jews. The pendant's decoration, an enameled peacock, is a symbol of bad fortune, boding ill for the young U.S. Army lieutenant, Jack Wiseman, who takes it from the Gold Train in 1945. In the present, he passes the pendant on to his unlucky-in-love granddaughter, Natalie, imploring her to return it to its rightful owner. With that request, the narrative leaps back in time, showing Jack's doomed romance with Ilona, a Holocaust survivor, and the life-changing early-20th-century friendship between pioneering female medical student Nina and dwarf suffragette Gizella Weisz. It also focuses on present-day Syrian-Jewish art dealer Amitai Shasho's attempts to come to grips with his past. Inventively told from multiple perspectives, Waldman's latest is a seductive reflection on just how complicated the idea of "home" is and why it is worth more than treasure.
