The Scrapbook
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, a stunning debut novel: the story of an intense first love haunted by history and family memory, inspired by the startling WWII scrapbook of Clark’s own grandfather, hidden in an attic until after his death
“An ambitious, stirring debut.” —People
“An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love.” —Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots
The traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism echo and reverberate through the present in this story of a lifechanging seduction.
Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation’s recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen.
As Anna travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, her perspective is powerfully interrupted by chapters that follow both of their grandfathers during the war. One witnesses the plight of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation and helps capture Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, while the other fights for Nazi Germany. Their fragmented stories haunt Anna and her lover two generations later—and may still tear them apart.
Not a “World War Two novel” in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming tale of first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies and historical conscience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Clark (Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath) makes her fiction debut with a potent story of two lovers, one American and one German, reckoning with the legacy of WWII. It's 1996 and Anna is in finals week at Harvard when she meets Christoph, a handsome and intelligent architecture student visiting from Germany. They end up spending the week together before he returns home. Set on seeing him again, Anna obtains a summer job teaching in Switzerland. She's also been intrigued by German history since finding her late grandfather's WWII mementos: a scrapbook of disturbing photos he snapped as a GI helping to liberate Dachau and the Nazi flag he took from Hitler's summer house. In Germany, Christoph and Anna tour the courthouse where the Nuremberg trials were held, and he considers the nature of evil and grapples with his guilt as a German over the Holocaust. He admits his grandfather served in the Wehrmacht, but claims that he later joined the resistance after he was left for dead on the battlefield. Anna and Christoph's discussions about all things German continue after they have sex against a tree in the Black Forest. He celebrates their encounter as something out of Goethe, while Anna feels like a character in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. After returning to the U.S., she realizes she's fallen in love with Christoph and is painfully unsure where she stands with him. Wartime vignettes featuring both of their grandfathers inject ironic and complicating truths into the nascent couple's narrative, and into the stories they tell about the past. It's a revelation.
