All My Sins Remembered
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of Sun at Midnight comes a saga of family, love, and betrayal set against the backdrop of two world wars.
Cousins Clio Hirsh and Grace Stretton were born within hours of each other and raised as sisters in the innocent days before the Great War. But as they grow up, Grace is the one who enchants all those who meet her, leaving shy and quiet Clio to fade into the background. Even as time, ambition, and the winds of war take their lives in different directions—Grace into the arms of a dependable stockbroker and Clio into the literary world of Paris and Berlin—jealousy and bitterness simmer beneath their friendship.
Decades later, Clio recounts the story of her family to her biographer. She tells of her brother Jake's wartime experiences and medical career; Clio and Grace's early years in bohemian London; younger brother Julius's career as a concert violinist. But for herself, Clio remembers a different story―one of tragedy, heartbreak, and secrets. And above all, the surprising truth about her mesmerizing cousin Grace.
"A master storyteller." —Cosmopolitan
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestselling novelist Thomas ( Bad Girls, Good Women ) sets this inconsistent, only partly engaging tale of family love and betrayal against a familiar historic backdrop spanning the two world wars. Born on the same day to mothers who are twins, cousins Clio Hirsh and Lady Grace Stratton look enough alike to be taken for twins themselves. But it's the mesmerizing Grace who holds the Hirsh boys, Jake and Julius, in thrall, leaving quieter Clio awash in envy. At 17, Grace steals Clio's first suitor for a lark. Bitter words ebb and flow between the two as Grace goes on to conceive an illegitimate child, marry a stolid stockbroker, then break into politics, while Clio pursues the literary life in the bohemian haunts of London, Berlin and Paris, where she bears the child of a German Jew in the shadow of the Holocaust. Meantime, encouraged by Grace's distasteful politics, Clio's youngest sister, Alice, flirts with Nazism, touching off a series of tragedies. Although Thomas packs her pages with intriguing peripheral characters and side plots, she never delivers much in the way of emotion. The novel's flimsy narrative device--an unlikable grandniece who pries all these family secrets from Clio--hides a neat one-two punch until the end. BOMC main selection.
