The Scrapbook
An intoxicating novel of first love and the shadows of history
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
An exhilarating debut novel about a life-changing romance in the long shadow of European history, inspired by the author's real discovery
‘Stunningly good’ Julia Boyd
‘You won’t be able to put it down’ Samantha Rose Hill
‘Worthy of reading and rereading’ Bookpage
Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls in love with Christoph, a German student visiting campus. As she visits Christoph in Germany and tries to understand the young, elegant man who fascinates her, he reveals his country to her.
Germany is still reckoning with the Holocaust and its pretty new squares belie the war’s destruction. Anna wants to believe in Christoph and the future he promises her but as their relationship becomes increasingly unsettling, she must face up to everything she has been unwilling to see, and everything Christoph has chosen to ignore.
'As if a Sally Rooney novel merged with Richard Linklater's film, Before Sunrise' Booklist
'A swiftly-moving, molecularly perceptive, singular portrait of intoxicating young love' Aube Rey Lescure
'An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love' Sana Krasikov
'A masterpiece' Rebecca Donner
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.
