Alexandra Fuller: Travel Light, Move Fast, Penguin Press (Penguin Random House USA) 9781984879219, paperback

Ever since a colleague at Penguin USA introduced me to Alexandra Fuller’s “Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness”,  have I been a huge fan of her books.  Her description of growing up with her larger than life parents, Tim and Nicola Fuller in war torn Africa, first in Rhodesia, later in Zambia, spending a free spirited childhood surrounded by wild animals before being sent off to several boarding schools in Africa, are one of the best memoirs I ever read together with “Don’t lets go to the dogs tonight”.

She is witty, brutally honest with herself and her family (no wonder her family call her books these “awful books” and hope she stops writing), her emotions raw when she writes; she made me laugh out loud and also had me crying many times.  “Travel Light, Move Fast” is no exception, it is brilliant. It is a document to her unforgettable character of a father who died suddenly aged 82 during a trip with her mother to Budapest.  The book is homage to his life philosophy, the man himself who was the black sheep of a wealthier English family and his marriage to her mother Nicola who was raised on a farm in Kenya.  Alexandra Fuller  weaves back and forth masterfully  between her days spent  at her dying fathers bed site and memories of him and their family life in Africa, his misadventures and failures,  forever resilient never giving up but just moving on to another place. At times I asked myself how much loss and misery a person can endure and still come out optimistic. Her accounts of what it was like growing up in such circumstance  with her sister Vanessa kept me glued. She loved and adored her father but never overlooked his flaws.  The loss of him becomes surreal when her ailing mother and Bobo, as she is called by her parents, have to fly home to their farm to Zambia with her father’s ashes on their laps.   The second half of the book is called ”The Widows Farm” dealing with her and her mother’s grief trying to carry on as a family on their Zambian farm without her level headed father holding the entire family together. When she returns to Wyoming to her own family, his loss becomes even more unbearable. But nothing prepared me for her rawest grief and shock at the end of the book, tears rolling down my face reading.   

It is one of the finest accounts of a very unusual family, life and love of family I have ever read.  This book will stick with me for a while, I hope she never stops writing.

Gytha Lodge:  She lies in Wait

9780241362976, hardback & 9781405938488 B format, available, Penguin Random House UK,

 

“She lies in Wait” is a well- crafted dark psychological thriller centered on a group of six teenagers and later adults, set in two time zones, 1983 and the present,  with alternating chapters, another  one of my summer reads.

Aurora Jackson, the youngest of the group, vanishes without a trace when the group of friends is out on a camping weekend experimenting with drugs, alcohol and sex in 1983. When they all wake up the next morning, Aurora’s sleeping bag is empty and she is gone. A then rookie DJ Sheen takes part in an extensive search for Aurora who remains lost. Despite some suspicious evidence pointing towards two of the male teenagers, there is never enough to nail them down and the body is never found. 30 years later the body is finally discovered, hidden in a hollow close to the river with a stash of drugs. DJ Sheens reopens the cold case and what follows are fascinating interview dynamics between the DJ and the group of friends who all claim to be innocent but who obviously have a lot to hide particularly since some of them have become wealthy and well known in their community. And one of them is obviously guilty.

The novel takes many twists and turns, you keep on guessing as if you were the detective in the case and the ending is very realistic. My only criticism is that it took too long for my taste, 400 pages could have been edited down somewhat. But that is probably the publishing professional in me speaking….

A captivating holiday read or for a rainy weekend.

 

Fiona Davis: The Masterpiece, Dutton, (Penguin Random House USA), 9781524742973, paperback

(German Edition: Wege ihrer Sehnsucht, 19. September 2019, Goldmann, Paperback

 

Summer time for me is often a time for light hearted reading. What attracted me to Fiona Davis “The Masterpiece” was her being inspired by two facts for this novel:  the artist Helen Dryden who was one of the most well paid female illustrators and industrial designers in 1920 and 30ties New York when female artist hardly had any recognition and the Supreme Court’s ruling to declare the Grand Central Terminal in New York a landmark saving it from developers. I had no idea there had actually been a  famous art school housed in the terminal, the Grand Central School of Art, which was founded by painters John Singer Sargent, Walter Leighton Clark and Edmund Greacen.

Davis’s novel “The Masterpiece” has two story lines: 1920ties and 1930 New York and 1974 with two strong female characters at its heart.   Clara Darden whose character is based on Helen Dryden using fictional liberties, is a teacher for illustrations at the Grand Central School of Art when magazines only used illustrators  before the event of photography. She is determined to make her way as a serious artist even if it means having no money and  going to bed hungry at night. Through a stroke of luck she meets Oliver whose admiration and advances she happily gives into. His family connections help her breaking out into the New York art world landing her a job as a highly paid illustrator at Vogue.  Clara’s artistic friendship with Levon Zakarian, a successful painter and fellow teacher at the art school, who originally started out being rival slowly turns into something more intimate and she finds herself being torn between two men.  But when the Great Depression of the 1929 hits, everyone’s life is tragically altered.

In 1974 Virginia Clay, a new divorcee, is trying to find her bearings after a severe illness and being traded in for a less flawed woman by her husband.    Never having had to work as a lawyer’s wife she finds the only job she can land is at the information booth of the Grand Central Station terminal which barely covers supporting herself and her teenage daughter Ruby. By sheer accident she discovers the closed off section of the former art school and is fascinated by a stunning watercolor she finds which has obviously been left behind.  Trying to find out more about the art school and  who the artist in question gives her a new purpose in life. When she and her coworkers learn that the fading beauty of what  once was a  glorious Grand Central station has brought developers on the plan who are eager to tear down the building for their own gain, Virginia gets involved to save this historic landmark.

I had great fun reading Fiona Davis' well-crafted “The Masterpiece” which will appeal to readers who are interested in historical fiction set in the world of art with a light mystery as a backdrop.  

Lara Prescott: The Secrets we kept, 9781786331670, Cornerstone, Penguin Random House UK, C format paperback, pub date September 5, 2019

I can barely believe that “The Secrets we kept” is Lara Prescott’s first novel. Her superbly reimagined story is based on facts around the publication of one of the most well-known books in literature, Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” for which he won the Nobel Prize.

Alternating between the seemingly invisible women in the CIA’s typing pool, two female agents, Irina and Sally, and Pasternak and his family in Russia, this captvating story around a literary masterpiece kept me firmly in its grip. The chapters set in Russia around Boris Pasternak and his mistress Olga Iwinskaja are my favourites, they touched me the most.

I was completely oblivious to the fact of the  CIA’s involvement in using the publication of “Doktor Schivago” as is the title in German and literature as such as a weapon against the Russians during the cold war, something which was only recently brought to life when documents were declassified. As someone who has worked in publishing almost her entire life, I was absolutely fascinated by this marvelous tale and was equally ignorant andshocked that Olga, Pasternak’s agent and lifelong mistress, was punished to several years of labour in Gulags paying the ultimate price for loving Pasternak and helping the novel come to life.

Feltrinelli, the great Italian publisher, mastered the ultimate coup in getting the censored book out of Russia publishing it despite the danger it posed to the lives of the author and his loved ones, believing in the power of this masterpiece. "Go find me the next Russian Nobel Prize winner", he was rumored to have said to his scouting agent and so he did.

I do not want to go too deeply into details of the book around the publication of “Doctor Zhivago” as it would spoil the entire pleasure of reading this vividly constructed novel about one of literature’s great classics, a book Stalin and his successors were so deeply afraid of banning from publication in Russia. I urge you to buy a copy of “The Secrets we kept” and promise you a page turning read once it comes out September 5th.

Catherine Cusset: Life of David Hockney, Other Press, New York, 9781590519837, paperback original, available

 

David Hockney is one of my favorite contemporary artists whose endless creativity and exploration of all artistic expressions be it acrylic, watercolor, oil, Polaroid’s, camera obscura, iPod drawings etc. never fail to amaze me.  When a friend from publishing brought me the proof of Catherine Cusset’s “Life of David Hockney”, a novel but very close to his actual biography, I thought to myself whether it was at all desirable to write such a book.  Should one not stick to the biography of living artists? The author herself even questions this but wrote it as homage to Hockney; she imagined feelings, dialogues and thoughts.  To make a long story short, I was very taken with this wonderful little book,   Catherine Cussets pulls it off with grace and vivid prose.  Her research was meticulous and she even met David Hockney after her French original was published to present him with this book.  He doesn’t seem to have minded this novel at all. It is a fascinating overview of David’s artistic and personal life.  He was openly gay early on and like many suffered loss, illness and heartbreak,  losing very close friends to the Aids outbreak.  His life has been split between California, London and Yorkshire where his family lived for many years inspiring him to create some of his greatest work.  If you are interested in David Hockney or are a close follower of his work like I am, I highly recommend this novel.

Sara Paretsky: Critical Mass, Berkeley (Penguin Random House USA) 9780451468185, paperback

(German Edition available as hardback "Kritische Masse, Ariadne Verlag)

  
Having ditched a novel in frustration after 200 pages, which one shall remain unnamed, I needed to return to safer author ground and a thriller it had to be. Sara Paretsky has been delivering excellent novels with gutsy female private investigator V.I. Warshawki  at their heart for years and an arm chair trip to my beloved Chicago sounded great.  I read a review rating her latest book “Critical Mass” with 5 stars; I can second that, she kept me glued.  How Paretsky pulls off writing about the complicated matter of nuclear physics  as well as stringing together a complicated  567 pages plot with numerous protagonists and historical details has my absolute admiration.  The thriller takes many twists and turns until finally racing to a satisfying ending.

Dr. Lotty Herschel, V.I.’s dear motherly friend in Chicago, had to flee the Holocaust 1937 via the kinder transport from Vienna to England and finally ended in Chicago as an adult where she became a highly regarded medical doctor. One of her childhood friends, Kitty Sagnior Binder, whom she fell out with later, fled with her leaving behind Kitty’s mother Martina who as a single mother was one of the most talented female physicists in Austria having been forced to work in a Nazi nuclear project.  Both Kitty and Lotty’s families perished in the Holocaust.  Kitty’s only daughter Judy had become a drug addict and dealer but when Lotty receives a desperate call from her fearing for her life but leaving no contact details, she hires Warshawki to find her.  Judy had abandoned her only child Martin as a baby leaving him with her mother Kitty. As a teenager the boy showed an exceptional scientific mind much like his lost great Jewish grandmother.  VI has an unpleasant conversation with paranoid Kitty finding her in a house with high security alarms and scared to death of unknown intruders.  She also learns that Martin, an adult now, has disappeared from his work at a computer company and has been missing  ever since.  Kitty’s seemingly unreasonable fear soon turns into deadly reality and VI becomes embroiled in chase that has its origin in Nazi Germany with some very high powered people unafraid of using all means to protect their secrets and wealth.

Jeanne Mackin: The Last Collection – A novel of Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel,  Berkley US/ Penguin Random House, 9780593099339, paperback

 

Summer time, fun reading and Jeanne Mackin’s “The Last Collection - A novel of Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel” hit the spot, especially since Frankfurt seems to have turned into the tropics for a few weeks. The book is historically well researched, also of the war years in Paris; a fascinating escapist read for the ladies, loved it.

I personally have always been more interested in Elsa Schiaparelli; she was the more positive, inspired and artistic of the two designers with a leaning towards Surrealism which she often applied to her fashion.  Schiap as she called herself was the opposite of Coco Chanel who was cool, arrogant, calculating and somewhat dictatorial leaving her workers often in tears.  She was also known to be leaning towards fascism befriending some high ranking Nazi officials before the occupation of Paris.  Hans Günther von Dincklage, the head of Hitler’s propaganda and press department, was rumoured to have been her lover granting her access to new German clients who were crazy about her perfume and elegant fashion.  Schiap in turn leaned more towards communism and socialism, detested the Nazi’s, housing refugees in her home  and was known to pay more than fair wages to her seamstresses.

The novel is centered on Lily Sutter, a very sympathetic young widow and budding artist. Visiting her brother Charlie in 1938 Paris, she gets entangled between the two rival designers when her brother insists on buying her a first couture dress to cheer her up.  Charlie, a promising medical doctor is in love with Ania, a stunningly beautiful, socially well connected woman who is stuck in an arranged marriage to an influential rich merchant. Charlie is unable to convince Ania to leave her husband as he keeps refusing to agree to a divorce or to give up their daughter.   Ania’s impeccable taste and money gains her unlimited access to both Chanel and Schiaparelli.  Lily gets caught up very quickly in Paris politics and fashion through her friendship to Ania and Schiaparelli who has struck up a friendship with the young woman offering her a job in her store.  Visiting Chanel’s salon on Schiaparelli's order, Lily meets and is strangely attracted to Otto, the attaché and driver to Hans Günther von Dincklage, a high ranking Nazi officer Chanel is trying to charm and gain as her lover eventually succeeding.  The looming threat of a World War II and it’s finally outbreak affects the lives of everyone tragically and brings Chanel and Schiaparelli’s rivalry to a head.

Mackin is an engaging storyteller, she created a very colorful novel  with such sympathetic protagonists as Charlie, Ania, Lily, Otto and the two famous fashion icons, I desperately  wanted to know what happened to them and learned a great deal about the world of Paris fashion in the Thirties as a side benefit.