The Scrapbook
An intoxicating novel of first love and the shadows of history
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A debut novel about a life-changing romance in the long shadow of European history, inspired by the author's real discovery.
'A singular portrait of intoxicating young love' AUBE REY LESCURE
'You wouldn't be able to put it down' SAMANTHA ROSE HILL
For years after I tried to tell myself that what happened between us was hardly worth remembering.
Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she meets Christoph, a German student visiting campus. They only spend a week together – discussing art, ideas and history – but it is long enough for Anna to fall desperately in love. Anna begins to visit Christoph in Germany. As she 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 and grand facades belie its recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains vague about the part his own grandparents played. Anna’s grandfather, meanwhile, was an American GI who took photos of the end of the war, photos that capture its horror, preserved in a scrapbook only Anna has seen.
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.
'An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love' Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots
'Heather Clark writes with a rare empathy' Times Literary Supplement
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.
