Wunderland
Ballantine Books Inc. (Verlag)
978-0-525-57691-4 (ISBN)
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USA TODAY BESTSELLER - "Searing . . . a heartbreaking page-turner."-People (Book of the Week)
An intimate portrait of a friendship severed by history, and a sweeping saga of wartime, motherhood, and legacy by an award-winning novelist
East Village, 1989
Things had never been easy between Ava Fisher and her estranged mother Ilse. Too many questions hovered between them: Who was Ava's father? Where had Ilse been during the war? Why had she left her only child in a German orphanage during the war's final months? But now Ilse's ashes have arrived from Germany, and with them, a trove of unsent letters addressed to someone else unknown to Ava: Renate Bauer, a childhood friend. As her mother's letters unfurl a dark past, Ava spirals deep into the shocking history of a woman she never truly knew.
Berlin, 1933
As the Nazi party tightens its grip on the city, Ilse and Renate find their friendship under siege-and Ilse's increasing involvement in the Hitler Youth movement leaves them on opposing sides of the gathering storm. Then the Nuremburg Laws force Renate to confront a long-buried past, and a catastrophic betrayal is set in motion. . . .
An unflinching exploration of Nazi Germany and its legacy, Wunderland is at once a powerful portrait of an unspeakable crime history and a page-turning contemplation of womanhood, wartime, and just how far we might go in order to belong.
Praise for Wunderland
"Engrossing . . . Epstein reveals the devastating choices these women make."-Real Simple
"Wunderland is both an engrossing family drama and a foray into a dark period of history . . . a wholly original angle to the WWII novel. You'll read it in one shivered sitting."-Refinery29
"A vividly written and stark chronicle of Nazism and its legacies."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A wealth of history turns Wunderland into a novel that's both beautiful and devastating. . . . Epstein taps into the 1930s prewar era, laying out an unsparing narrative that details tragic events and horrifying legacies . . . opening a new door that may lead to redemption and joy for future generations."-BookPage (starred review)
"[A] heartbreaking historical tour de force . . . Man's inhumanity to man-and the redemptive power of forgiveness-is on stark and effective display in Epstein's gripping novel, a devastating tale bound for bestseller lists."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
1. Ava 1989 She sits in a sea of tangled sheets and blankets, amid the white crests of packing peanuts and age-curled pages of letters pried from their envelopes with increasing feverishness. The bed is solid: the same heavy oaken headboard, same stained, sloping mattress upon which she has slept and breastfed and read and sketched for more than a decade; the one place she comes to truly be at rest. And yet at this moment, she's somehow both floating off it and falling right through it, is both untethered and sinking like a stone. Perching her reading glasses atop her head, Ava Fischer clasps her knees to her chest. Her face tight and hot with tears shed, dried, and shed again, she tosses the last of the letters onto the bed. Surveying the sun-challenged domain that serves as both drawing studio and master bedroom, she finds herself amazed that it looks exactly as it did a little over an hour earlier, while in the same amount of time her entire world has been gutted, brusquely turned on its head. And yet the illustration she's been working on still sits atop her drafting table, anchored at one corner by an untouched plate of marmalade toast and another by a cold coffee mug inscribed with Drink Me. A few peanuts that escaped in her initial frenzy of unpacking the box still lie strewn on the shag carpet, air-puffed stars in eccentric and porous constellations against a worn, dun-colored sky. But it's the bed that holds the full evidence of Ava's emotional undoing. The bed, with its wrinkled sheets and mismatched cushions, its dusty bedskirt and moth-eaten coverlet, its stale tobacco tang that somehow lingers on four full years after she stopped smoking. The bed, with the now-empty Luftpost carton her daughter had signed for earlier and carried in to Ava with mild curiosity (It's from Bremen. Isn't that where you grew up?). The bed upon which Ava had then waited for what felt like hours, box in her lap, for Sophie to leave to meet her friends. Upon finally hearing her daughter's plastic-soled flats patter down three flights of stairs before exiting onto Second Avenue, she'd dropped the package long enough to lunge toward the window to watch the fourteen-year-old stroll off, her hands in the pockets of her checked menswear vest, Walkman headphones glinting silver in the sun. The bed, where she'd read the lawyer's curtly formal note less with shock than a sinking sense of acceptance: Sehr geehrte Frau von Fischer: As your mother's lawyer and designated executor of her estate, I regret to inform you that your mother--Ilse Maria von Fischer--passed away on the twelfth of April, after a long battle with uterine cancer. In accordance with her wishes, I enclose her remains for your disposal and request that you confirm delivery by fax or phone at the numbers listed on our letterhead. Once we have your confirmation we will be able to release the remainder of your inheritance, roughly 71,000 marks. If you do not confirm receipt in person, I've been instructed to donate this amount to The Blue Card, a charity of your late mother's choosing. I also include some letters that your mother asked be forwarded to you, and request that you confirm receipt of these as well. With condolences and best regards: Bernard Frankel, LLP Leaning stiffly against the headboard, Ava again forces herself to make these impossible-seeming connections: between the idea of remains and the Tupperware-style container she'd pulled from beneath the peanuts an hour earlier. Between Mama--that inevitably fraught and painful thought--and the gritty powder Ava had discovered upon prying off the container's lid. It hadn't smelled like Ilse, that disquietingly familiar blend of facial soap, 4711 cologne, and faint perspiration. It certainly hadn't looked like her; in Ava's mind's eye her mother was eternally milk-skinned and muscular, golden-haired and silver-eyed. Above all, overwhelmingly dense. And yet staring into the ashy depths
| Erscheinungsdatum | 02.01.2020 |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | New York |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 132 x 203 mm |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen |
| ISBN-10 | 0-525-57691-6 / 0525576916 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-525-57691-4 / 9780525576914 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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