Europe Archives - The Gilmore Guide to Books

Annelies by David Gillham

Catherine — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 08:37:11 +0000

As much as I love historical fiction, there are some people who should be left to history rather than brought back in fiction. After reading David Gillham’s Annelies I believe Anne Frank is one of these. She is too deeply imbued by her own writing, the writing she left behind to be reconsidered by another […]

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Mischling

Catherine — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 07:58:11 +0000

It’s hard to imagine there is a place more horrible than Auschwitz but Affinity Konar has found the horror within the horror by setting her novel Mischling in Josef Mengele’s lab. Pearl and Stasha, twelve-year-old identical twins, entwined heart and soul from the womb, arrive at Auschwitz in 1944 to find themselves faced with […]

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Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

Catherine — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 08:38:07 +0000

Within the first 15 pages of Savage Continent by Keith Lowe I learned that by the end of World War II: The Germans had destroyed 93% of Warsaw’s buildings 18-20 million Germans were rendered homeless due to the destruction of their cities 70,000 villages in the USSR were obliterated either by the Germans or by […]

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The Book of Aron

Catherine — Mon, 04 May 2015 07:10:57 +0000

Set in a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland The Book of Aron is, like any Holocaust novel, difficult reading. But what makes it so, is not graphic depictions of violence against Jews it is the interminable grind of life lived in circumstances that have nowhere to go but down. At first, it is simply that […]

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Hausfrau

Catherine — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 07:27:18 +0000

Anna is an American, married, mother of three who lives in a suburb of Zurich with her Swiss husband. Despite her efforts she cannot acclimate to Switzerland and exists in a state of low-level depression that expresses itself through having multiple affairs. She is the wife in Jill Anderson Essbaum’s Hausfrau, a new novel that […]

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Gretel and the Dark

Catherine — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 07:20:16 +0000

Unless you’re reading a book of short stories it is unusual to get more than one scary plot in a single novel, but that is exactly what happens in Eliza Granville’s debut novel Gretel and the Dark. There is Lilie, the beautiful young patient of Dr. Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud’s mentor. She is found beaten, […]

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The Anatomy Lesson

Catherine — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 07:28:25 +0000

Aris Kindt was not necessarily a bad man but he was a thief. For every town where he was caught he was whipped and branded so his torso and neck told the painful history of his life. It isn’t until he returns to Amsterdam and is caught stealing a burgher’s fine coat that he is […]

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No One is Here Except All of Us

Catherine — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 08:49:10 +0000

That one world is at war does nothing to interrupt the patient churning of peaceful years someplace far away. There are so many kinds of fiction and so many ways an author can draw a reader in. Some appeal to the masses and write a quick easy read and some require more from their readers. […]

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