We Are Only Ghosts
A Remarkable Novel of Survival in the Wake of WWII
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4.5 • 27개의 평가
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- US$9.99
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An exhilarating, brutally candid saga about sexuality and war, tenderness and trauma, young passion and fierce hate, as a teenage boy’s unexpected, complicated relationship with a Nazi officer in a WWII death camp is resurrected in 1960s New York City.
We Are Only Ghosts depicts queer desire against the horrors of death camps and the psychosis of those who got out alive—haunted forever by those who did not—balancing the violence and hatred of war and its aftermath with many poignant moments of tenderness and joy. For readers of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne, and Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart.
New York City, 1968: The customers at Café Marie don’t come just for the excellent coffee and pastries. They come for the sophisticated ambiance, and the illusion of being somewhere other than a bustling, exhausting city. Headwaiter Charles Ward helps create that illusion through impeccable service—unobtrusive, nearly invisible, yet always watchful.
It’s a skill Charles honed as a young Jewish boy in war-torn Europe, when avoiding attention might mean the difference between life and death. But even then, one man saw him all too clearly—a Nazi officer who was both his savior and tormentor.
At seventeen, Charles was deported to Auschwitz with his family. There he was singled out by Obersturmführer Berthold Werden, who hid him in his home. Their entanglement produced a tortured affection mixed with hatred that flares to life again, decades later, when Berthold walks into Café Marie.
Drawn back into Berthold’s orbit, Charles is forced to revisit the pain and the brief, undeniable pleasures of the life he once knew. And if he acts on his growing hunger for revenge, will he lose his only tether to the past—the only other witness to who he was and everything he endured—or find peace at last?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A gay Holocaust survivor confronts the man who both saved and broke him in the intense latest from Richards (after The Summer of Jenny Wade). In 1968 New York City, 42-year-old waiter Charles Ward recognizes a restaurant patron as Berthold Werden, a fugitive German paramilitary soldier from Auschwitz going by a different name. Charles has complicated feelings about Berthold, who enslaved Charles for sex and domestic service but also rescued him from being worked to death in the camp. Berthold, not recognizing Charles, invites him to dinner, and Charles accepts. During their evening together, Charles reveals who he is, and their sexual relationship reignites. The past, however, haunts Charles, and he debates whether he wants to see Berthold arrested for war crimes. In flashbacks, Richards tells Charles's wartime story in reverse chronology, starting with his time working at a bakery in small-town Germany during the collapse of the Nazi regime, then the torments of his imprisonment in Auschwitz with Berthold, and lastly his few, desperate months in the Terezin ghetto in 1941. The well-woven narrative conveys Charles's personal horrors of the Holocaust while delicately probing his messy entanglement with Berthold. Thanks to an unusual premise and complex morality, this stands out in the crowded field of Holocaust fiction.
