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The Scrapbook
From the award-winning author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, a stunning debut novel: the story of an intense first love haunted by history and family memory, inspired by the startling WWII scrapbook of Clark’s own grandfather, hidden in an attic until after his death
The traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism echo and reverberate through the present in this story of a lifechanging seduction.
Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation’s recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen.
As Anna travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, her perspective is powerfully interrupted by chapters that follow both of their grandfathers during the war. One witnesses the plight of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation and helps capture Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, while the other fights for Nazi Germany. Their fragmented stories haunt Anna and her lover two generations later—and may still tear them apart.
Not a “World War Two novel” in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming tale of first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies and historical conscience.
The traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism echo and reverberate through the present in this story of a lifechanging seduction.
Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation’s recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen.
As Anna travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, her perspective is powerfully interrupted by chapters that follow both of their grandfathers during the war. One witnesses the plight of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation and helps capture Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, while the other fights for Nazi Germany. Their fragmented stories haunt Anna and her lover two generations later—and may still tear them apart.
Not a “World War Two novel” in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming tale of first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies and historical conscience.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published June 17, 2025
89 people are currently reading
6211 people want to read
About the author
Heather Clark
6 books82 followersDr. Heather Clark is an American writer, literary critic and academic.
Her biography of poet Sylvia Plath, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize.
Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars fellowship, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York.
She is also the author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (2011) and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972 (2006).
Her debut novel The Scrapbook will be published on 7 June 2025.
Heather Clark is currently working on a biography on Anne Sexton as well as on a group biography about the Boston years of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich and Maxine Kumin.
Her biography of poet Sylvia Plath, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize.
Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars fellowship, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York.
She is also the author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (2011) and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972 (2006).
Her debut novel The Scrapbook will be published on 7 June 2025.
Heather Clark is currently working on a biography on Anne Sexton as well as on a group biography about the Boston years of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich and Maxine Kumin.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 99 reviews
June 2, 2025
4.5
1996, Anna.. a student at Harvard meets Christoph an intellectual architectural student from Germany in her final weeks of classes. They spend the week together before he returns to Germany.
Anna is very taken with him and plans on seeing him again…
She makes several trips to Germany to see him, on each visit they go to many German cities and sites pertaining to Hitler and the war.
In the recent past, Anna’s grandfather had passed and she found a scrapbook with photos from his time in WWll, disturbing photos from Dachau when they liberated it and a Nazi flag he took from Hitler’s summer house.
Christoph admits his grandfather served in the Wehrmacht, and later the resistance.
We see wartime vignettes from each grandfather throughout the story.
Anna is in love with Christoph …Christoph is more distant…
Can their relationship survive the war history shadow?
I was so immersed in this novel.
Thank you to Netgalley and Pantheon for this ARC!
1996, Anna.. a student at Harvard meets Christoph an intellectual architectural student from Germany in her final weeks of classes. They spend the week together before he returns to Germany.
Anna is very taken with him and plans on seeing him again…
She makes several trips to Germany to see him, on each visit they go to many German cities and sites pertaining to Hitler and the war.
In the recent past, Anna’s grandfather had passed and she found a scrapbook with photos from his time in WWll, disturbing photos from Dachau when they liberated it and a Nazi flag he took from Hitler’s summer house.
Christoph admits his grandfather served in the Wehrmacht, and later the resistance.
We see wartime vignettes from each grandfather throughout the story.
Anna is in love with Christoph …Christoph is more distant…
Can their relationship survive the war history shadow?
I was so immersed in this novel.
Thank you to Netgalley and Pantheon for this ARC!
June 21, 2025
** Spoilers below **
DNF at 21%
I have a huge admiration and respect for Clark's academic work, especially on Sylvia Plath, but this novel kept giving me a jarring feeling as it just doesn't ring true in any convincing manner. I appreciate that the scrapbook is based on an authentic artefact left behind by Clark's grandfather but the fact that the story in set in 1996-7 means that there is over 50 years between the events of the Holocaust, and the point at which Anna and Christoph meet and start discussing this history which, ultimately, comes between them.
There's a huge amount of history that takes place in Germany and Europe more broadly in that time span that is never really acknowledged: the de-Nazification that took place in Germany, the outlawing of the use of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, demilitarisation, the extensive education and commemorations that take place in Germany in recognition of the horrors of the Third Reich. It may indeed be the case that individual participants didn't talk about their war (I have German friends who say their grandparents wouldn't speak of those times) but the state and Christoph's generation who were in their 20s in the late 1990s in this book are a different European generation. Germany is an important part of the modern European project and participates in all memorialisation events for the Holocaust and WW2 more generally. The stolpersteine project launched in 1992, four years before Anna goes to Germany - a project that marked places where Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime (gays, disabled, Roma, communists etc.) were last seen. And yet, somehow, this book is proposing that an American and a German in 1997 whose grandfathers fought on different sides during WW2 can never be together?
Anna, despite being a Harvard graduate and about to start post-grad work at Oxford seems unbearably naive: she is shocked to hear Christoph speaking his native German and thinks now she doesn't know him as the same person who speaks to her in English... because he sounds like the Nazis in the war films she's watched! She's surprised to find his bookcases full of German (and French) books! Her Harvard Jewish roommates won't speak to him because they assume all Germans are Nazis - this is 1996, remember - and state they'd never go to Germany. In Europe, many Jews were German so there is a far more complicated relationship that this book isn't really dealing with.
Despite being in love with Christoph, Anna treats his country and culture as if it's a pariah: 'I had little interest in learning German. I could not seem to separate it from the Nazi barks I had heard in movies... I had never heard of Verbier, or lebkuchen or gluhwein or Christmas markets'. She also seems to know little about either the war or its aftermath despite so many documents being in the public domain including in the Holocaust Museum in Washington. She makes Christoph take her to Nuremburg and doesn't know anything about the trials - she's surprised to find a book that is 'an account of the trials, written by a famous American psychiatrist'.
In the end, this German vs. American divide splits the couple up. In 1997. I mean, I could understand this happening in, say the 1950s, but in 1996-7? It just doesn't make any sense.
I wonder if this is a book that will engender very different responses from American vs. European audiences? It feels like it's educating Americans on WW2 - never a bad thing, of course, but it feels simplistic to a point that is almost insulting. And treating modern Germans as if they have made no attempt to come to terms with their own national history, despite Anna claiming to have read W.G. Sebald: the very picture of a German who was born in 1944 and yet has struggled with a despairing burden of guilt.
The whole thrust of this book, published in 2025, made me recall a scene in Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by journalist Katherine Stewart: she goes to a MAGA event where American neo-Nazi groups are openly wearing, selling and promoting fascist and Nazi memorabilia including t-shirts with swastikas, and how the young German film crew who were with her were opening shocked that this was legal in America in a way that would have been outlawed in Germany.
I dnf'd this book at 20% skipping straight to the final chapter as it was making no sense to me... If it completely turned everything on its head later (though that final chapter doesn't indicate a sea-change), then apologies but I just couldn't continue reading this.
DNF at 21%
I have a huge admiration and respect for Clark's academic work, especially on Sylvia Plath, but this novel kept giving me a jarring feeling as it just doesn't ring true in any convincing manner. I appreciate that the scrapbook is based on an authentic artefact left behind by Clark's grandfather but the fact that the story in set in 1996-7 means that there is over 50 years between the events of the Holocaust, and the point at which Anna and Christoph meet and start discussing this history which, ultimately, comes between them.
There's a huge amount of history that takes place in Germany and Europe more broadly in that time span that is never really acknowledged: the de-Nazification that took place in Germany, the outlawing of the use of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, demilitarisation, the extensive education and commemorations that take place in Germany in recognition of the horrors of the Third Reich. It may indeed be the case that individual participants didn't talk about their war (I have German friends who say their grandparents wouldn't speak of those times) but the state and Christoph's generation who were in their 20s in the late 1990s in this book are a different European generation. Germany is an important part of the modern European project and participates in all memorialisation events for the Holocaust and WW2 more generally. The stolpersteine project launched in 1992, four years before Anna goes to Germany - a project that marked places where Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime (gays, disabled, Roma, communists etc.) were last seen. And yet, somehow, this book is proposing that an American and a German in 1997 whose grandfathers fought on different sides during WW2 can never be together?
Anna, despite being a Harvard graduate and about to start post-grad work at Oxford seems unbearably naive: she is shocked to hear Christoph speaking his native German and thinks now she doesn't know him as the same person who speaks to her in English... because he sounds like the Nazis in the war films she's watched! She's surprised to find his bookcases full of German (and French) books! Her Harvard Jewish roommates won't speak to him because they assume all Germans are Nazis - this is 1996, remember - and state they'd never go to Germany. In Europe, many Jews were German so there is a far more complicated relationship that this book isn't really dealing with.
Despite being in love with Christoph, Anna treats his country and culture as if it's a pariah: 'I had little interest in learning German. I could not seem to separate it from the Nazi barks I had heard in movies... I had never heard of Verbier, or lebkuchen or gluhwein or Christmas markets'. She also seems to know little about either the war or its aftermath despite so many documents being in the public domain including in the Holocaust Museum in Washington. She makes Christoph take her to Nuremburg and doesn't know anything about the trials - she's surprised to find a book that is 'an account of the trials, written by a famous American psychiatrist'.
In the end, this German vs. American divide splits the couple up. In 1997. I mean, I could understand this happening in, say the 1950s, but in 1996-7? It just doesn't make any sense.
I wonder if this is a book that will engender very different responses from American vs. European audiences? It feels like it's educating Americans on WW2 - never a bad thing, of course, but it feels simplistic to a point that is almost insulting. And treating modern Germans as if they have made no attempt to come to terms with their own national history, despite Anna claiming to have read W.G. Sebald: the very picture of a German who was born in 1944 and yet has struggled with a despairing burden of guilt.
The whole thrust of this book, published in 2025, made me recall a scene in Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by journalist Katherine Stewart: she goes to a MAGA event where American neo-Nazi groups are openly wearing, selling and promoting fascist and Nazi memorabilia including t-shirts with swastikas, and how the young German film crew who were with her were opening shocked that this was legal in America in a way that would have been outlawed in Germany.
I dnf'd this book at 20% skipping straight to the final chapter as it was making no sense to me... If it completely turned everything on its head later (though that final chapter doesn't indicate a sea-change), then apologies but I just couldn't continue reading this.
June 13, 2025
It's the mid-90s, and when Anna meets Christoph, it feels right. Their relationship cannot be easy—he's German, she's American, and to make it work they'll have to span an ocean. But their conversations are deep and the attraction is there and this is a relationship unlike any other that she's had. And: their grandfathers fought on opposing sides of WWII, and with Anna trying to understand her grandfather's experience better, her relationship with Christoph feels like something that can make it tangible. And if Christoph doesn't seem as invested as she is, well. They can make it work, surely. It's fate, or something like that.
The Scrapbook takes place mostly in the 90s (Anna and Christoph) and partly in the 40s (their grandfathers). Christoph holds fast to the story that one of his grandfathers joined the resistance, while acknowledging that someday he'll have to find out—and face—what else that grandfather did in the war; Anna's grandfather has a more straightforward trajectory, but not one without its horrors. His scrapbook, the one the book is named after, is based on Clark's own grandfather's scrapbook, so there's an interesting based-on-a-true-story element to part of the plot.
It was kind of surprising to me how focused Anna and Christoph are on WWII—while I may be misremembering, it is not clear to me whether Anna has any real understanding of what happened in Germany between 1945 and 1990. To be fair, she is a product of the American education system (my own American history classes never made it past Reconstruction, and I never took a world history class), and even now WWII continues to get a lot more press than the DDR. It's so clear, early on in the book, that their intense conversations about war and trauma are not really sustainable; they know each other mostly in short, intense bursts, the sort of brief time frames where people can hold on to the image they want to project rather than letting the more...maybe not the more honest parts, but the more prevalent parts of themselves through. I guess by the end of the book I was still wondering a bit who Christoph is outside the limited parts Anna sees of him. Not the best fit for me, but I'm glad to have read this (I'm always interested in contemporary fiction about post-war and post-DDR Germany).
Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy via NetGalley.
The Scrapbook takes place mostly in the 90s (Anna and Christoph) and partly in the 40s (their grandfathers). Christoph holds fast to the story that one of his grandfathers joined the resistance, while acknowledging that someday he'll have to find out—and face—what else that grandfather did in the war; Anna's grandfather has a more straightforward trajectory, but not one without its horrors. His scrapbook, the one the book is named after, is based on Clark's own grandfather's scrapbook, so there's an interesting based-on-a-true-story element to part of the plot.
It was kind of surprising to me how focused Anna and Christoph are on WWII—while I may be misremembering, it is not clear to me whether Anna has any real understanding of what happened in Germany between 1945 and 1990. To be fair, she is a product of the American education system (my own American history classes never made it past Reconstruction, and I never took a world history class), and even now WWII continues to get a lot more press than the DDR. It's so clear, early on in the book, that their intense conversations about war and trauma are not really sustainable; they know each other mostly in short, intense bursts, the sort of brief time frames where people can hold on to the image they want to project rather than letting the more...maybe not the more honest parts, but the more prevalent parts of themselves through. I guess by the end of the book I was still wondering a bit who Christoph is outside the limited parts Anna sees of him. Not the best fit for me, but I'm glad to have read this (I'm always interested in contemporary fiction about post-war and post-DDR Germany).
Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy via NetGalley.
July 22, 2025
On April 29, 1945, 19-year-old Herbert J. Clark arrived at the gates of Dachau with the 86th Infantry, the Blackhawk Division, soon after the camp had been liberated, and took out his camera.
What propels a stunned 19-year-old, a child in the world, to take pictures of cattle cars filled with corpses, piles of bodies all around him, is a mystery. But the urge welling up inside him must have been overwhelming.
A dead cold whisper whistling in his ear, saying “Never forget this, record it, remember it.”
Decades later, Heather Clark saw the pictures that her grandfather took, for the first time, gathered in a plum-colored scrapbook, along with other wartime mementos. Herbert had just passed away, but she heard the whisper, loud and powerful.
Harvard 1996. A German boy. An American girl.
50 years have passed since the end of World War II and yet the ghosts of generations past, his and hers, reverberate and echo through a long-distance love story that is both fraught and incredibly tender.
How does one live “innocently” in the shadow of the Holocaust? What does it mean to atone for the sins of past generations? How should one remember the horrors? How do you live side by side with the knowledge?
“The Scrapbook” is a dark and luminous novel that explores these questions through the eyes of Anna, the precocious young American and Christoph, the German student who steals her heart.
And somehow, miraculously, it holds both the unbearable lightness of new love and the impenetrable darkness of history, blurring the borders between one’s electric present and the dead cold whispers of the past.
What propels a stunned 19-year-old, a child in the world, to take pictures of cattle cars filled with corpses, piles of bodies all around him, is a mystery. But the urge welling up inside him must have been overwhelming.
A dead cold whisper whistling in his ear, saying “Never forget this, record it, remember it.”
Decades later, Heather Clark saw the pictures that her grandfather took, for the first time, gathered in a plum-colored scrapbook, along with other wartime mementos. Herbert had just passed away, but she heard the whisper, loud and powerful.
Harvard 1996. A German boy. An American girl.
50 years have passed since the end of World War II and yet the ghosts of generations past, his and hers, reverberate and echo through a long-distance love story that is both fraught and incredibly tender.
How does one live “innocently” in the shadow of the Holocaust? What does it mean to atone for the sins of past generations? How should one remember the horrors? How do you live side by side with the knowledge?
“The Scrapbook” is a dark and luminous novel that explores these questions through the eyes of Anna, the precocious young American and Christoph, the German student who steals her heart.
And somehow, miraculously, it holds both the unbearable lightness of new love and the impenetrable darkness of history, blurring the borders between one’s electric present and the dead cold whispers of the past.
September 5, 2025
@pantheonbooks | #gifted THE 𝗦𝗖𝗥𝗔𝗣𝗕𝗢𝗢𝗞 by Heather Clark is in many ways a WWII story, but it takes place 50 years after the end of the war. It’s 1996 when Anna and Christoph first meet in Cambridge, just before she graduates from Harvard. There’s an instant attraction and their relationship continues that summer when Anna travels to Europe. Haunting both of them are the lingering horrors of the war. Anna’s grandfather saw much at the end of the war and left a scrapbook with vivid pictures of the realities he saw as his unit crossed through Germany. Christoph, like many Germans, feels a great weight from the choices of his countrymen and has to reconcile his own grandfathers’ parts in that war.
I found this book particularly interesting because my older son worked in Germany right out of college for 6 years beginning in the aughts. He saw much of this sense of weight and responsibility from the Germans he became close friends with. It’s a heavy burden to carry and he saw that first hand. This book brings that out and I particularly loved that angle.
The relationship itself was also well portrayed with the angst of young love compounded by distance. I very much liked the way it was all tied together. I will say there was A LOT of talk about books, authors, essayists, etc. In some ways this was essential to the story, but it also got a little old for me. There was no need to be familiar with the works, but Clark almost made me feel like I SHOULD be and that was a bit of a drawback and at times interrupted the overall flow.
While I wouldn’t call 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘣𝘰𝘰𝘬 light summer reading, it’s a book I very much enjoyed and find myself still thinking about. Plus, at a slim 256 pages, it was a very fast read! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I found this book particularly interesting because my older son worked in Germany right out of college for 6 years beginning in the aughts. He saw much of this sense of weight and responsibility from the Germans he became close friends with. It’s a heavy burden to carry and he saw that first hand. This book brings that out and I particularly loved that angle.
The relationship itself was also well portrayed with the angst of young love compounded by distance. I very much liked the way it was all tied together. I will say there was A LOT of talk about books, authors, essayists, etc. In some ways this was essential to the story, but it also got a little old for me. There was no need to be familiar with the works, but Clark almost made me feel like I SHOULD be and that was a bit of a drawback and at times interrupted the overall flow.
While I wouldn’t call 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘣𝘰𝘰𝘬 light summer reading, it’s a book I very much enjoyed and find myself still thinking about. Plus, at a slim 256 pages, it was a very fast read! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
August 28, 2025
I feel disheartened having to give this a 3-star rating, as it is obvious the author invested a lot of work and time into the research and subsequent writing of this book. There are parts that are beautiful, and the importance of the history portrayed is unquestionable.The power of this book lies in the silences and spaces—that which is left unsaid. I did have conflicting feelings about this power, though—at times I could really appreciate the silences. In other instances it felt imposed, leaving too much up for interpretation.
I appreciated the writing on art and music to a great extent, as well as some of the thoughts that Anna had in regard to her newfound relationship with Christoph. In particular excerpts such as this,
"I wanted, in that moment, to tell him what he meant to me. That he was the first man who didn't leave my bed at dawn. That he was the first man who made me breakfast, poured me coffee, gave me roses. That he was the first man who didn't fear my intelligence. Who played Debussy for me, who took me to museums, castles, mountaintops. That he was the first man who told me I was beautiful. Who cared about my pleasure.
Who listened."
It was passages similar to this one that kept me reading—especially since the start of this was a bit slow. But around the halfway point, I could feel a momentum building, a crescendo. A fervor was starting, simmering beneath the words that something momentous was striving to break free. It did eventually, resulting in the ending being a bit predictable. I could still appreciate the journey I took to get there.
Looking at what was problematic for me, I felt in particular that the flow was off-kilter, particularly in the relationship between Christoph and Anna. Perhaps this was the point. The author didn't want this to feel easy. It felt strained and difficult to maneuver repeatedly throughout. The two live in different countries, making this a problematic example of a blossoming relationship. Long-distance relationships are typically not effortless. Additionally, I felt that too much of their relationship was based on conversations about the war—that this was too overpowering in the context of their relationship. It felt too consuming to the story as a whole, and I felt a bit overburdened by the heaviness of all of the complex history that was presented.
I definitely still think this is worth a read for those who love history—in particular WWII—and how it shouldn't be forgotten. This novel is an appreciable example of how history can tie into our present, as well as shape our future.
I appreciated the writing on art and music to a great extent, as well as some of the thoughts that Anna had in regard to her newfound relationship with Christoph. In particular excerpts such as this,
"I wanted, in that moment, to tell him what he meant to me. That he was the first man who didn't leave my bed at dawn. That he was the first man who made me breakfast, poured me coffee, gave me roses. That he was the first man who didn't fear my intelligence. Who played Debussy for me, who took me to museums, castles, mountaintops. That he was the first man who told me I was beautiful. Who cared about my pleasure.
Who listened."
It was passages similar to this one that kept me reading—especially since the start of this was a bit slow. But around the halfway point, I could feel a momentum building, a crescendo. A fervor was starting, simmering beneath the words that something momentous was striving to break free. It did eventually, resulting in the ending being a bit predictable. I could still appreciate the journey I took to get there.
Looking at what was problematic for me, I felt in particular that the flow was off-kilter, particularly in the relationship between Christoph and Anna. Perhaps this was the point. The author didn't want this to feel easy. It felt strained and difficult to maneuver repeatedly throughout. The two live in different countries, making this a problematic example of a blossoming relationship. Long-distance relationships are typically not effortless. Additionally, I felt that too much of their relationship was based on conversations about the war—that this was too overpowering in the context of their relationship. It felt too consuming to the story as a whole, and I felt a bit overburdened by the heaviness of all of the complex history that was presented.
I definitely still think this is worth a read for those who love history—in particular WWII—and how it shouldn't be forgotten. This novel is an appreciable example of how history can tie into our present, as well as shape our future.
June 13, 2025
I feel so guilty rating 4 books in a row 2 stars or less, I promise I’m not a hater tho.
So for this one, it had potential, and I was enjoying the vibes for the first 50%-60% but then it started getting boring and it eventually lost me, and guess what was the reason behind my dislike for it? He cheated, yup, you heard that right, and then guess what happened? She forgave him, UNBELIEVABLE, I do not support cheaters, nor the people who go back to them when they apologize, and that was exactly what happened.
I questioned Christoph’s way of act, he was so short-tempered but only in mere moments was he okay, as for Anna (or is it Anne?) I don’t think I have any opinions on this character.
Jess’s and Susie’s friendship w the FMC felt so off most if not all of the time.
I was also so confused?? I didn’t know where the conversation was coming from, the start of the book feels like I’m reading from the middle of the book because nothing was explained, and I went to it completely blind.
Definitely have so much more to say but let’s not spread negativity on here.
Thank you NetGalley, the publisher for the ARC in exchange of a honest review.
So for this one, it had potential, and I was enjoying the vibes for the first 50%-60% but then it started getting boring and it eventually lost me, and guess what was the reason behind my dislike for it? He cheated, yup, you heard that right, and then guess what happened? She forgave him, UNBELIEVABLE, I do not support cheaters, nor the people who go back to them when they apologize, and that was exactly what happened.
I questioned Christoph’s way of act, he was so short-tempered but only in mere moments was he okay, as for Anna (or is it Anne?) I don’t think I have any opinions on this character.
Jess’s and Susie’s friendship w the FMC felt so off most if not all of the time.
I was also so confused?? I didn’t know where the conversation was coming from, the start of the book feels like I’m reading from the middle of the book because nothing was explained, and I went to it completely blind.
Definitely have so much more to say but let’s not spread negativity on here.
Thank you NetGalley, the publisher for the ARC in exchange of a honest review.
October 30, 2025
The Author made some fantastic research about Germany after 1933 -1945. It has a list of it. It would interesting to read some originals. Many things I did not know, e.g. Entartete Kunstausstellung in München in 1937.
May 25, 2025
gosh this was incredibly wonderful.
April 17, 2025
The Scrapbook by Heather Clark as reviewed by Gail M. Murray
This debut novel by renowned biographer, Heather Clark, has a contemporary feel as much of the story takes place in 1996-1997. English Literature student, Anna, meets handsome German architectural student Christoph at a Harvard party. She’s immediately infatuated with his striking blond looks and European intellect, leading to an intense love affair. They delve into all things German from composers to authors. This part is written in short, staccato sentences minus quotation marks. When their grandfather’s war experiences (Spring 1945) are described, the prose is lengthy and detailed. Their relationship is haunted by family secrets. When Anna arrives in Germany, Christoph gives her a different perspective on the war as they visit Nuremberg, scene of Nazi war trials and heavily bombed Hamburg (bombings which helped turn the tide of the war, psychologically) and the utter despair at Dachau. Although the love story is tender and poignant, it’s as though the author is using the dialogue between the lovers as a vehicle to inform the reader. It doesn’t distract from the modern day romance. Clark was inspired to write this upon discovering her own grandfather’s scrapbook complete with harrowing photos of Dachau. There is a long list of extensive resources. A fluid, fast paced and compelling read. A look at WWII from a different perspective.
Heather Clark, Pantheon Books, c2025, $27.00, HB, pp256, 9780593701904
June 25, 2025
This is a very difficult book to review for several reasons. The structure of the writing sort of bothered me as there are no quotation marks and we see everything in the present through Anna's eyes.
The book is lightly based on the grandfather of the author's wartime experiences, which she learned of from a scrapbook his sister's made for him.
1996, Anna is at Harvard when she meets Christopher, a friend of her band mate Josh. She is quite taken with him and visits him in Germany several times. They travel around Germany discussing the war and visit Munich, Dachau, Heidelberg and other places where Anna's grandfather spoke of. They discuss literature and Philosophy.
There are several chapters from the point of view of Anna's grandfather and a chapter from the point of view of Christopher's.
Anna's 2 Harvard roommates, who are Jewish never feel comfortable with him and worry that Anna is going to get hurt. We never really know what Christopher is thinking or feeling. I found the ending unsatisfying.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the EARC. The opinions are mine alone. I will probably recommend this book to some of my book clubs, because the issues are important to discuss.
The book is lightly based on the grandfather of the author's wartime experiences, which she learned of from a scrapbook his sister's made for him.
1996, Anna is at Harvard when she meets Christopher, a friend of her band mate Josh. She is quite taken with him and visits him in Germany several times. They travel around Germany discussing the war and visit Munich, Dachau, Heidelberg and other places where Anna's grandfather spoke of. They discuss literature and Philosophy.
There are several chapters from the point of view of Anna's grandfather and a chapter from the point of view of Christopher's.
Anna's 2 Harvard roommates, who are Jewish never feel comfortable with him and worry that Anna is going to get hurt. We never really know what Christopher is thinking or feeling. I found the ending unsatisfying.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the EARC. The opinions are mine alone. I will probably recommend this book to some of my book clubs, because the issues are important to discuss.
April 3, 2025
Thank you to Pantheon for the advance reader copy of The Scrapbook! I had really high hopes for this book based on the plot description but it really fell flat for me. The love story between the two main characters didn’t feel realistic - it was very one-sided and I did not feel any emotions towards Christoph or Anna. They were not very likable characters and didn’t have much of a personality. Their conversations were very stilted and the dialogue became awkward anytime the war was brought up. I also had a hard time believing that Anna’s friends would have been so vehemently against her dating a German man in the late 90s.
November 29, 2025
Well researched and very readable open ended love story entangled with 3rd Reich / Nazism / holocaust history. One of the many books with this scope, distinguished by the deeper exploration of German philosophical and historical debates (eg Historikerstreit) and visits to many of Germany’s holocaust sites. I liked how the lovers get to know each other and themselves in the mirror of history. Please, I want to read one book where the female is the unreliable and immoral character and the vulnerable male suffers.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 21, 2025
I really wanted to like this book because it has so many touch points and commonalities with my own life and history but I just didn’t. The entire relationship seemed to be a construct in Anna’s head more than anything, and it was boring too, like reading the journal of a major over thinker. Her desperation is almost embarrassing to read.
Then there were the facts about him: not only is he a member of a fraternity (which is rare in Germany), he’s in a FENCING fraternity, which is the most conservative group of students. That does not fit at all with his take on the Nazi time. And then he’s Catholic from Hamburg, which is also a total exception. And even more bewildering, he uses WE when he talks about Germans in WWII. I am almost exactly the age of the protagonists in the story and studied predominantly literature and history of the Nazi time, so I had a lot of conversations like they have in the book, and NEVER have I heard any of us refer to the generation of our grandparents in the war as “we Germans”. Equally bewildering and zero percent aligned with my own experience is the almost hatred the young Jewish American roommates feel for the German their age.
Overall, many of the parts feel right but the whole doesn’t at all.
Then there were the facts about him: not only is he a member of a fraternity (which is rare in Germany), he’s in a FENCING fraternity, which is the most conservative group of students. That does not fit at all with his take on the Nazi time. And then he’s Catholic from Hamburg, which is also a total exception. And even more bewildering, he uses WE when he talks about Germans in WWII. I am almost exactly the age of the protagonists in the story and studied predominantly literature and history of the Nazi time, so I had a lot of conversations like they have in the book, and NEVER have I heard any of us refer to the generation of our grandparents in the war as “we Germans”. Equally bewildering and zero percent aligned with my own experience is the almost hatred the young Jewish American roommates feel for the German their age.
Overall, many of the parts feel right but the whole doesn’t at all.
December 11, 2025
..lieliskās Silvijas Plātas biogrāfijas autorei ir savs romāns un tas atgādina Plātas "Stikla kupola" stāstu (romāna varone nāk no vietas, kur dzīvoja Plāta, mācījās tur, kur Plāta utt.). stāsts ir par studentu mīlestību, kam jāšķērso okeāns. nezinu, cik naivi ir domāt, ka var pastāvēt attiecības, ja viens dzīvo štatos, bet otrs Vācijā, jo grūti būtu jau tad, ja viens mācās Rīgā, bet otrs – Jelgavā. :) pa vidu visam stāsts par opapiem un karu. par to arī abi pārsvarā sarunājas. vienā vietā tiek minētas arī Plātas dzejolis. / 3,5*
May 18, 2025
Thank you to Pantheon for the free book/arc. All opinions are my own.
4.5 Stars
A Harvard student, Anna, is close to graduating when she falls for a transfer student from Germany. Handsome, intelligent, and very serious, Christoph seems to be just as enamored of Anna. They talk books, course work, some about their respective futures and about the shared history of grandparents on either side of WWII.
Anna has seen the notebook her Great Aunts put together from photos her grandfather took while in Germany. Grandfather rarely speaks of that time and never shares the notebook. The photos are haunting and unforgettable and probably play into the alcoholism that plagued him post tour of duty.
Christoph, clings to the idea that one of his Grandfathers was more conscripted as opposed to sold out to the Nazi ideal. (You must read this to see where it's going). However, Christoph is also haunted by what his country has done, and therefore what he has done.
These conversations interspersed by chapters of the grandfathers in Germany circa 1943+ are devastating and compelling. They are the best part of the book. I'd recommend to readers to read the Author's Note in the back for the book's inspiration.
The bulk of the story takes place in the mid-1990s between the two students in their early 20s. I wanted to shake Anna as did her roommates. She was sold out to Christoph far more than was reciprocated. Their relationship was unequal and sitting in 2025 hard to take. Thankfully, some personal growth happens.
Every time I read a book that leans into WWII, I learn something new. Something appalling. Something I feel I should have known or questioned but didn't. The Scrapbook is no different. I wish I had asked my grandfather who was there during WWII how he felt when he returned to Germany and the Black Forest decades later in the late 1960s.
4.5 Stars
A Harvard student, Anna, is close to graduating when she falls for a transfer student from Germany. Handsome, intelligent, and very serious, Christoph seems to be just as enamored of Anna. They talk books, course work, some about their respective futures and about the shared history of grandparents on either side of WWII.
Anna has seen the notebook her Great Aunts put together from photos her grandfather took while in Germany. Grandfather rarely speaks of that time and never shares the notebook. The photos are haunting and unforgettable and probably play into the alcoholism that plagued him post tour of duty.
Christoph, clings to the idea that one of his Grandfathers was more conscripted as opposed to sold out to the Nazi ideal. (You must read this to see where it's going). However, Christoph is also haunted by what his country has done, and therefore what he has done.
These conversations interspersed by chapters of the grandfathers in Germany circa 1943+ are devastating and compelling. They are the best part of the book. I'd recommend to readers to read the Author's Note in the back for the book's inspiration.
The bulk of the story takes place in the mid-1990s between the two students in their early 20s. I wanted to shake Anna as did her roommates. She was sold out to Christoph far more than was reciprocated. Their relationship was unequal and sitting in 2025 hard to take. Thankfully, some personal growth happens.
Every time I read a book that leans into WWII, I learn something new. Something appalling. Something I feel I should have known or questioned but didn't. The Scrapbook is no different. I wish I had asked my grandfather who was there during WWII how he felt when he returned to Germany and the Black Forest decades later in the late 1960s.
July 25, 2025
I loved this book so so much. Deeply researched, and so beautifully contextualized through memory and the inheritance of general guilt and trauma. I’ve read a lot of books this year about fascism, and this era of history, but this one ranks near the top. So so good.
August 13, 2025
A smart and affecting novel of ideas (literary, philosophical, historical) and memory, tied together with a not-fully-believable, mostly fraught love story. Still, I was engaged by and learned from the lovers’ conversations (and the narrator’s ruminations) even as I doubted their believability, and the historical interludes were both revealing and compelling (and, though fictional, seemed very authentic and believable). It’s not flashy or especially complex, but the novel made me think and was emotionally resonant as well.
June 29, 2025
Excellent.
September 3, 2025
Finished the audiobook in one sitting on a plane. The self-absorbed part of me always finds it comforting to read books about Harvard girls with a bad case of wanderlust making youthful misjudgments in life and love. But IMO it would be more compelling and powerful for the 1996 characters to explore questions of generational culpability, etc. without giving the reader “answers” with the 1945 chapters. Felt a bit antithetical and reductive.
September 17, 2025
4.5 stars and rounding up because I was totally engaged, every page. The protagonists are of college age. Their grandfathers fought in WWII, but on opposite sides (American, German). They have a long distance romance; when they get together, they discuss the morality of the war with great seriousness, which I found fascinating. The ending fizzled out in a disappointing way.
December 18, 2025
Not what I was expecting. I finished it but it wasn’t that great. It just felt like it was missing something and seemed very plain for such a deep subject.
November 19, 2025
I like reading about the different facts about Germany as of the past and the present in the book. However, the book overall did not quite land for me.
October 17, 2025
I think she did an excellent job with very difficult subject matter. She raises lots of good questions about culpability and the fact that everybody knew what was going on with the holocaust and the murder of the Jews, but ignored it, took their property, took their shoes. The fact that part of it was inspired by her grandfather‘s experience in the war and being in Dachau makes it even more interesting.
May 21, 2025
THE SCRAPBOOK is a moving, intelligent, sexy story about love and legacy in the generational shadows of WWII.
July 13, 2025
This felt like work. Girl, he sucks. We don't think he's a Nazi, we just think he's a shit person. I didn't see any pictures, so I'll just take your word for it that he's hot. Hotness covers a multitude of sins, but you can have boring conversations with people who are nice to you. His grandparents were maybe Nazi's though, too problematic. We got hot, boring dudes in America, too.
September 21, 2025
The thing about a book like this is that it never lets you forget the sound of a voice. Not the polished sort of literary voice, not the flattened register of crime reports and police statements, but a voice that carries history, humor, and hurt in its inflection. Reading through these pages, I often felt as though I were not turning paper at all but sitting in someone’s front room, a plate of fried fish and hard dough bread balanced on my lap, while Miss Hortense herself leaned across the table to tell me what really happened, who really said what, and why we had all better pay attention to the small signs that mark the truth. This is a novel constructed not only as a mystery but also as a testament to oral storytelling, to the cadence of Caribbean English folded into British streets, to the rhythm of a woman who has lived too long among secrets to ever take them lightly.
The story begins with bones — the domino bones that clatter on the table in the early sections, the “bones” of memory that surface decades after they ought to have been buried, the bones of the community itself as it tries to stand upright under pressure. From there we are pulled into the labyrinthine casework of Miss Hortense, who takes up the task of “looking into” what others would prefer remain quiet. She is part nurse, part detective, part griot, and wholly uncompromising. Around her swirl an ensemble of neighbors, friends, church sisters, men with secrets, women with burdens, and children caught in the tangle of past misdeeds. The book sprawls, yes, but the sprawl is intentional, a map of a community in which every side-street conversation and every whispered prayer holds weight.
One of the triumphs here is the way character is drawn. Miss Hortense is not a tidy sleuth. She is sharp-tongued, quick to cuss her teeth, but also full of care. Her moral compass is unwavering, even when her methods are not polite. She nurses wounds, she collects stories, she jots notes in her black leather notebook, and when the time comes, she unravels the threads of conspiracy with the patience of someone used to stitching skin closed. Around her, figures like Blossom — meddling, dramatic, often wrong but rarely silent — and Fitz — stalwart, long-suffering, grumbling yet loyal — form a chorus of commentary that both grounds and distracts. Even the Mavises, so easily dismissed as comic relief, prove integral to the atmosphere, embodying the mix of faith, fear, and foolishness that courses through the community.
The central mysteries — the Bone Twelve attacks of 1969 and 1970, the death of Constance Brown, the murder of Nigel, the shadowy return of long-gone men — are layered carefully, though sometimes at risk of becoming tangled. What keeps them coherent is the notebook itself, Hortense’s list of names and clues, her alphabet of victims and secrets. The novel is at once about solving crimes and about the act of record-keeping, about who gets to write history and who is written out of it. The recurring note of Exodus 20:14 — “Thou shalt not commit adultery” — is emblematic: scripture as weapon, as code, as accusation whispered by a predator. Religion is not a sanctuary here but an unstable force, just as often complicit in harm as it is in healing.
Themes of justice and secrecy dominate. The book never lets us forget that for the Caribbean migrants in late-1960s and early-1970s England, the police were not allies. To seek justice, one had to seek it through community — through the Pardner system, through whispered alliances, through the dogged persistence of women like Hortense. It is a deeply political novel in that sense, even as it couches its politics in the familiar trappings of mystery. Who tells the story? Who gets believed? Who carries shame, and who is allowed to shed it? These questions matter as much as the names of killers.
Stylistically, the book is distinctive. It does not imitate Agatha Christie so much as it refracts her through the lens of diasporic speech. The reveal, in which Hortense gathers the room and addresses each suspect in turn, is pure Poirot — but the cadence is not Belgian, nor Oxbridge, nor BBC English. It is Caribbean-inflected English, oral and looping, filled with proverbs, repetitions, and the sly humor of lived community knowledge. To some readers, this voice will feel like music. To others, especially those unused to its rhythms, it may take adjustment. But it is precisely this choice that makes the novel sing.
There are, however, undeniable weaknesses. The cast is sprawling, and though the notebook device helps anchor us, one can lose track of minor characters and their entanglements. The pacing, too, lags in the middle third. There are stretches where conversations circle and repeat, where revelations feel delayed not by necessity but by indulgence. The climactic reveal sequence, though satisfying in its breadth, risks exhaustion: the room is thick with gasps, accusations, counter-accusations, letters pulled from handbags, and it can feel theatrical in a way that tests patience. Yet even when I found myself weary, I was compelled to keep turning the pages — partly because of the voice, partly because the stakes for these characters were never abstract.
What impressed me most was the novel’s willingness to blur guilt and innocence. Myrtle’s confession about Danny, for instance, complicates our sense of justice. She is both executioner and believer, both guilty of a killing and convinced of her righteousness. Pastor Williams, revealed to have secret entanglements and illegitimate ties, is both compromised and pitiable. Even Blossom, who so often seems ridiculous, is given weight as someone whose lies and rumors have consequences. And Miss Hortense herself is not above reproach: she is relentless, sometimes manipulative, occasionally cruel in her pursuit of truth. Yet she remains admirable, a necessary thorn.
The final movements of the book — the unmasking of Mr. Wright as Melvin Bright, the exposure of Constance’s machinations, the inheritance twists, the lingering grief over Errol, the reappearance of ghosts thought dead — tie the narrative together with both satisfaction and sorrow. It is not a clean ending, because life is not clean. Cuttah’s death at the close reminds us that cycles of violence and betrayal do not stop just because one set of truths has been spoken aloud. Peace, if it comes at all, comes at a price.
To call this simply a “mystery novel” would be to undersell it. It is a community chronicle, a diasporic epic compressed into the scale of parlors, kitchens, church halls, and domino tables. It is about survival in a country that offered no welcome, about women who built networks of care when institutions failed them, about secrets that fester until someone insists on naming them. It is also about the corrosive weight of carrying too many secrets, about how keeping the peace often means silencing the truth, and about the danger of letting silence stand.
In the end, what makes the novel memorable is not only who killed whom, or how many clues were laid, but the way it captures a world. The meals, the songs, the squabbles, the pride, the weariness — all are rendered with texture. Miss Hortense may be fictional, but she feels lived, as if somewhere in a Midlands town a woman with her notebook still sits, still listening, still writing down the things the rest of us would rather forget.
That is why, despite its flaws, despite its occasional meandering and overlong explanations, the book leaves a strong impression. It is not perfect. It is not sleek. But it is alive, and in its life it offers a portrait of justice sought against the odds.
My reception of the book rests at 82 out of 100.
The story begins with bones — the domino bones that clatter on the table in the early sections, the “bones” of memory that surface decades after they ought to have been buried, the bones of the community itself as it tries to stand upright under pressure. From there we are pulled into the labyrinthine casework of Miss Hortense, who takes up the task of “looking into” what others would prefer remain quiet. She is part nurse, part detective, part griot, and wholly uncompromising. Around her swirl an ensemble of neighbors, friends, church sisters, men with secrets, women with burdens, and children caught in the tangle of past misdeeds. The book sprawls, yes, but the sprawl is intentional, a map of a community in which every side-street conversation and every whispered prayer holds weight.
One of the triumphs here is the way character is drawn. Miss Hortense is not a tidy sleuth. She is sharp-tongued, quick to cuss her teeth, but also full of care. Her moral compass is unwavering, even when her methods are not polite. She nurses wounds, she collects stories, she jots notes in her black leather notebook, and when the time comes, she unravels the threads of conspiracy with the patience of someone used to stitching skin closed. Around her, figures like Blossom — meddling, dramatic, often wrong but rarely silent — and Fitz — stalwart, long-suffering, grumbling yet loyal — form a chorus of commentary that both grounds and distracts. Even the Mavises, so easily dismissed as comic relief, prove integral to the atmosphere, embodying the mix of faith, fear, and foolishness that courses through the community.
The central mysteries — the Bone Twelve attacks of 1969 and 1970, the death of Constance Brown, the murder of Nigel, the shadowy return of long-gone men — are layered carefully, though sometimes at risk of becoming tangled. What keeps them coherent is the notebook itself, Hortense’s list of names and clues, her alphabet of victims and secrets. The novel is at once about solving crimes and about the act of record-keeping, about who gets to write history and who is written out of it. The recurring note of Exodus 20:14 — “Thou shalt not commit adultery” — is emblematic: scripture as weapon, as code, as accusation whispered by a predator. Religion is not a sanctuary here but an unstable force, just as often complicit in harm as it is in healing.
Themes of justice and secrecy dominate. The book never lets us forget that for the Caribbean migrants in late-1960s and early-1970s England, the police were not allies. To seek justice, one had to seek it through community — through the Pardner system, through whispered alliances, through the dogged persistence of women like Hortense. It is a deeply political novel in that sense, even as it couches its politics in the familiar trappings of mystery. Who tells the story? Who gets believed? Who carries shame, and who is allowed to shed it? These questions matter as much as the names of killers.
Stylistically, the book is distinctive. It does not imitate Agatha Christie so much as it refracts her through the lens of diasporic speech. The reveal, in which Hortense gathers the room and addresses each suspect in turn, is pure Poirot — but the cadence is not Belgian, nor Oxbridge, nor BBC English. It is Caribbean-inflected English, oral and looping, filled with proverbs, repetitions, and the sly humor of lived community knowledge. To some readers, this voice will feel like music. To others, especially those unused to its rhythms, it may take adjustment. But it is precisely this choice that makes the novel sing.
There are, however, undeniable weaknesses. The cast is sprawling, and though the notebook device helps anchor us, one can lose track of minor characters and their entanglements. The pacing, too, lags in the middle third. There are stretches where conversations circle and repeat, where revelations feel delayed not by necessity but by indulgence. The climactic reveal sequence, though satisfying in its breadth, risks exhaustion: the room is thick with gasps, accusations, counter-accusations, letters pulled from handbags, and it can feel theatrical in a way that tests patience. Yet even when I found myself weary, I was compelled to keep turning the pages — partly because of the voice, partly because the stakes for these characters were never abstract.
What impressed me most was the novel’s willingness to blur guilt and innocence. Myrtle’s confession about Danny, for instance, complicates our sense of justice. She is both executioner and believer, both guilty of a killing and convinced of her righteousness. Pastor Williams, revealed to have secret entanglements and illegitimate ties, is both compromised and pitiable. Even Blossom, who so often seems ridiculous, is given weight as someone whose lies and rumors have consequences. And Miss Hortense herself is not above reproach: she is relentless, sometimes manipulative, occasionally cruel in her pursuit of truth. Yet she remains admirable, a necessary thorn.
The final movements of the book — the unmasking of Mr. Wright as Melvin Bright, the exposure of Constance’s machinations, the inheritance twists, the lingering grief over Errol, the reappearance of ghosts thought dead — tie the narrative together with both satisfaction and sorrow. It is not a clean ending, because life is not clean. Cuttah’s death at the close reminds us that cycles of violence and betrayal do not stop just because one set of truths has been spoken aloud. Peace, if it comes at all, comes at a price.
To call this simply a “mystery novel” would be to undersell it. It is a community chronicle, a diasporic epic compressed into the scale of parlors, kitchens, church halls, and domino tables. It is about survival in a country that offered no welcome, about women who built networks of care when institutions failed them, about secrets that fester until someone insists on naming them. It is also about the corrosive weight of carrying too many secrets, about how keeping the peace often means silencing the truth, and about the danger of letting silence stand.
In the end, what makes the novel memorable is not only who killed whom, or how many clues were laid, but the way it captures a world. The meals, the songs, the squabbles, the pride, the weariness — all are rendered with texture. Miss Hortense may be fictional, but she feels lived, as if somewhere in a Midlands town a woman with her notebook still sits, still listening, still writing down the things the rest of us would rather forget.
That is why, despite its flaws, despite its occasional meandering and overlong explanations, the book leaves a strong impression. It is not perfect. It is not sleek. But it is alive, and in its life it offers a portrait of justice sought against the odds.
My reception of the book rests at 82 out of 100.
June 3, 2025
Heather Clark’s “The Scrapbook,” which looked to be much my cup of tea with its literariness and dual story lines of a young couple in modern times and their grandparents in World War II, nevertheless proved less than overall enthralling for me mostly because its principals in the contemporary parts, Anna, an American like me and therefore seemingly the more relatable, and Christoph, a German who nevertheless is ready to hold his countrymen's feet to the fire for their historical offenses, simply weren’t that engaging for me.
This despite my sharing a path of literary studies with Anna – hers at august Harvard and mine at the lesser but still estimable University of Illinois. With the difference, though, that unlike the rigorous regimen that my studies made for me (one 19-hour semester was especially brutal), hers seemed not to tax her that much – indeed, for all her complaining about Christoph keeping her from her studies when he inconveniently comes to visit one semester, she still manages, even with the time she spends with him, to do almost as well as she might have otherwise (me, I had trouble that one semester finding time to take in a movie).
So well, indeed, does she do that she’s accepted for graduate study at Oxford, which she seems not to regard with the intimidation it would make for me – I’d have been intimidated by Northwestern! – but rather simply for the easier access its location affords to Christoph.
So finally not so relatable for me, Anna.
Still, considerably more relatable she was for me than Christoph, who for all the unorthodox German perspective he brings to his countrymen’s attitudes toward the Reich – they delude themselves, he says, in thinking that they would have behaved significantly better than their forebears – he’s a bit of a heel with how he treats Anna, including how he slips away from her once and she comes upon him in an intimate embrace with an old flame.
So even less relatable for me than Anna, Christoph.
A sentiment shared, incidentally, by a girlfriend of Anna’s, who in addition to being put off by his shabby treatment of her is less than impressed by his chest-beating about the wartime sins of his country – poor Christoph, she says, what a heavy historical burden he carries.
Which, for all that I could appreciate the sentiment, what with his behavior toward Anna, nevertheless struck me as unduly dismissive – more than a little mitigating I found his readiness to embrace his country’s past. Still, between his bad behavior toward Anna and her not-so-fully-committed stance toward her studies, their sections of the novel lacked engagement for me.
Considerably more engaging for me, with how both my parents served in the war, my father as an Army officer and my mother as an Army nurse, were the sections about Anna and Christoph’s wartime ancestors, including on Christoph’s side a grandfather who in the losing days of the war was pressed into service as a teenager but toward the end ditches his uniform and makes his way back home, where he encounters an American unit and is pressed into service as a translator by one of the GIs – a grandfather of Anna’s, as it improbably happens, who goes on to capture the Eagle’s Nest, from which he takes and brings back to the States a Nazi flag.
Much more relatable for me, as I say, those parts, than the contemporary love affair, which nevertheless had its moments for me, as when, in that most uncomfortable of moments for all couples, Christoph takes Anna home to meet his parents and the situation's general discomfort is heightened by his father, who when he learns that Anna went to Groton notes that FDR was also an alum and, not so commendably of him, turned back a boatload of Jewish refugees.
For all the discomfort that the moment makes for Anna, though, the visit isn’t entirely distressing for her with how, as they await the father’s arrival home, Christoph shows her his mother’s library, which puts to shame her own home’s paltry single bookcase and includes books by Goethe, Schiller, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Wolf, Ledig, Grass and Sebald as well as books in French by de Beauvoir and Sartre and books in English by Toni Morrison and, especially notable for me for my being a huge fan, Joan Didion.
A particular treat that part of the book made for the literary devotee in me, though still tame stuff against the war parts of the grandparents on either side, including a particularly traumatic experience for Anna’s grandfather, Jack, when his ship encounters a U-boat and for all his assurances to a terrified crewmate that all will be well, he knows full well that, if sunk, they wouldn’t survive ten minutes in the cold North Atlantic – the sort of graphic wartime detail that occasionally made Clark's novel truly engrossing for me.
Indeed, for all that I like to think, with my especial interest in World War II, that I’m pretty squared away on Third Reich details, there was still much new for me to be absorbed in Clark’s novel, including Goebbels having a Ph.D. in Romantic literature and Hannah Arendt having an affair with Heidegger and ties between Nazism and Romanticism and the Allies having actually paid pensions of some German soldiers, even some Waffen-SS.
But most compelling for me for the sheer horror of it on either side was the toll of the air raids, most notably, with the amount of detail accorded it, the bombing of Hamburg, which Christoph notes killed 40,000 in a single night and made for a million people leaving the city (some of the women, he noted, had corpses of dead babies in their suitcases) and which he describes to chilling effect:
“It was like Nagasaki. People tried to escape the bomb cellars when the oxygen ran low and the walls got hot, but they got stuck in the melting asphalt outside. Or they died in the firestorm. It was a hurricane in the streets. Everything was burning. I don’t know how anyone survived.”
Of course, as he dutifully allows, there were atrocities perpetrated by both sides, including the bombing of London, and, most horribly, the death camps, which, particularly with a trip to Dachau the couple makes, the book attempts – awkwardly, to my mind – to link to their own situation:
“But I felt that what was happening between us was connected, somehow, to the things we had seen and talked about in Nuremberg, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Munich, Berchtesgaden, Dachau.”
All in all, though, an engrossing read, Clark's novel, for all my nits, particularly with parallels I found with our own time, including, apropos of Christoph’s disallowance of German denial of wartime guilt, remarks I heard just the other day from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who in discussing his new book, “On Character,’ refused to let Americans off the hook for the unnervingly authoritarian-leaning character of our times.
This despite my sharing a path of literary studies with Anna – hers at august Harvard and mine at the lesser but still estimable University of Illinois. With the difference, though, that unlike the rigorous regimen that my studies made for me (one 19-hour semester was especially brutal), hers seemed not to tax her that much – indeed, for all her complaining about Christoph keeping her from her studies when he inconveniently comes to visit one semester, she still manages, even with the time she spends with him, to do almost as well as she might have otherwise (me, I had trouble that one semester finding time to take in a movie).
So well, indeed, does she do that she’s accepted for graduate study at Oxford, which she seems not to regard with the intimidation it would make for me – I’d have been intimidated by Northwestern! – but rather simply for the easier access its location affords to Christoph.
So finally not so relatable for me, Anna.
Still, considerably more relatable she was for me than Christoph, who for all the unorthodox German perspective he brings to his countrymen’s attitudes toward the Reich – they delude themselves, he says, in thinking that they would have behaved significantly better than their forebears – he’s a bit of a heel with how he treats Anna, including how he slips away from her once and she comes upon him in an intimate embrace with an old flame.
So even less relatable for me than Anna, Christoph.
A sentiment shared, incidentally, by a girlfriend of Anna’s, who in addition to being put off by his shabby treatment of her is less than impressed by his chest-beating about the wartime sins of his country – poor Christoph, she says, what a heavy historical burden he carries.
Which, for all that I could appreciate the sentiment, what with his behavior toward Anna, nevertheless struck me as unduly dismissive – more than a little mitigating I found his readiness to embrace his country’s past. Still, between his bad behavior toward Anna and her not-so-fully-committed stance toward her studies, their sections of the novel lacked engagement for me.
Considerably more engaging for me, with how both my parents served in the war, my father as an Army officer and my mother as an Army nurse, were the sections about Anna and Christoph’s wartime ancestors, including on Christoph’s side a grandfather who in the losing days of the war was pressed into service as a teenager but toward the end ditches his uniform and makes his way back home, where he encounters an American unit and is pressed into service as a translator by one of the GIs – a grandfather of Anna’s, as it improbably happens, who goes on to capture the Eagle’s Nest, from which he takes and brings back to the States a Nazi flag.
Much more relatable for me, as I say, those parts, than the contemporary love affair, which nevertheless had its moments for me, as when, in that most uncomfortable of moments for all couples, Christoph takes Anna home to meet his parents and the situation's general discomfort is heightened by his father, who when he learns that Anna went to Groton notes that FDR was also an alum and, not so commendably of him, turned back a boatload of Jewish refugees.
For all the discomfort that the moment makes for Anna, though, the visit isn’t entirely distressing for her with how, as they await the father’s arrival home, Christoph shows her his mother’s library, which puts to shame her own home’s paltry single bookcase and includes books by Goethe, Schiller, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Wolf, Ledig, Grass and Sebald as well as books in French by de Beauvoir and Sartre and books in English by Toni Morrison and, especially notable for me for my being a huge fan, Joan Didion.
A particular treat that part of the book made for the literary devotee in me, though still tame stuff against the war parts of the grandparents on either side, including a particularly traumatic experience for Anna’s grandfather, Jack, when his ship encounters a U-boat and for all his assurances to a terrified crewmate that all will be well, he knows full well that, if sunk, they wouldn’t survive ten minutes in the cold North Atlantic – the sort of graphic wartime detail that occasionally made Clark's novel truly engrossing for me.
Indeed, for all that I like to think, with my especial interest in World War II, that I’m pretty squared away on Third Reich details, there was still much new for me to be absorbed in Clark’s novel, including Goebbels having a Ph.D. in Romantic literature and Hannah Arendt having an affair with Heidegger and ties between Nazism and Romanticism and the Allies having actually paid pensions of some German soldiers, even some Waffen-SS.
But most compelling for me for the sheer horror of it on either side was the toll of the air raids, most notably, with the amount of detail accorded it, the bombing of Hamburg, which Christoph notes killed 40,000 in a single night and made for a million people leaving the city (some of the women, he noted, had corpses of dead babies in their suitcases) and which he describes to chilling effect:
“It was like Nagasaki. People tried to escape the bomb cellars when the oxygen ran low and the walls got hot, but they got stuck in the melting asphalt outside. Or they died in the firestorm. It was a hurricane in the streets. Everything was burning. I don’t know how anyone survived.”
Of course, as he dutifully allows, there were atrocities perpetrated by both sides, including the bombing of London, and, most horribly, the death camps, which, particularly with a trip to Dachau the couple makes, the book attempts – awkwardly, to my mind – to link to their own situation:
“But I felt that what was happening between us was connected, somehow, to the things we had seen and talked about in Nuremberg, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Munich, Berchtesgaden, Dachau.”
All in all, though, an engrossing read, Clark's novel, for all my nits, particularly with parallels I found with our own time, including, apropos of Christoph’s disallowance of German denial of wartime guilt, remarks I heard just the other day from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who in discussing his new book, “On Character,’ refused to let Americans off the hook for the unnervingly authoritarian-leaning character of our times.
November 25, 2025
A novel of collective guilt set in GERMANY
1996: Anna, an American, is aware of her Grandfather’s history, that he was one of the first Americans to enter Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, he looted a large Nazi flag from the property, bundled it up and now, it has been an almost forgotten item in the family’s archive back in the States. At Harvard Anna meets Christoph, a German, and is drawn to him, so much so that she follows him to Bavaria via a Summer placement in Switzerland. But theirs is a sporadic relationship, carried out over a good year. He seems unwilling to return to the States, where Anna’s Jewish housemates struggle to contain their animosity towards him because he is German. Thus, the couple has brief trysts in Germany, with long spells apart. In Germany, Anna feels she has the opportunity to probe his family’s past, always pushing to ascertain details of his grandparents’ role in WW2, set against her own grandfather’s role as an American GI, who entered Dachau just after it was liberated, followed by his entry into the Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden.
This story is inspired by the author’s discovery of a scrapbook which her own grandfather had kept and the American GI in the story is inspired by him and his experiences.
The author writes well and this coming-of-age novel has an interesting premise. The couple visits several places across Germany, mostly with pronounced links to WW2; this gives Anna the opportunity to continue her relentless drilling into his family’s past. Each new adventure inevitably circles back to the default setting of WW2 and, after a while, this feels like quite a forced device. Issues of shame, individual/collective culpability and national guilt are fleetingly addressed time and again, and the question is raised of how much the individual in modern Germany (in 1996, that is) should spend contemplating the past. The debate around atonement becomes quite the Leitmotif.
The individual characters of Anna and Christoph aren’t particularly well developed and the relationship hasn’t been sufficiently deeply set by Chapter 3 (p21), so it is a surprise when Anna muses “I was becoming tired of Christoph’s moods“. Yes, he has been inattentive at times but there really wasn’t enough depth for the reader to warrant such an observation. In psychological terms Christoph seems to have an avoidant personality and Anna’s flatmates keep warning her off him.
They travel to Nuremberg, where she is regaled with the story of Kaspar Hauser (which possibly felt like padding), they visit the Dürer house and the Palace of Justice, where the Nazi trials were held. Generally, as they travel around, there is a nice sense of Germany as a backdrop.
On one visit, they travel the 4 hours to Hamburg by train (just after Anna has arrived into Frankfurt from America) and they arrive for a late lunch (it would have to be very late, I think), they then visit the city, they go to the St Nikolai Memorial and then have dinner with Christoph’s parents, and only then head out to the Christmas Markets (which tend to close on the early side each day). The activities on this particular day felt impossibly crammed into what felt like an unrealistic timescale and I couldn’t get my head around the timeline. It was at this point that I felt a firm editing hand needed to intervene, especially as there were certain German words throughout the text that appeared with capital letters, but others nouns were left in lower case (which should have been upper case) like lebkuchen, weissbier.
In one of the flashbacks to the end of WW2, the author describes a package being handed by an American to a German, which included antibiotic ointment; that, however, wasn’t developed until the mid 1950s.
The story is written without speech marks, which on the one hand makes it a bit hard to read as conversations cross into description and it can take a couple of moments to figure out who is speaking; on the other, perhaps. it is a deliberate ploy to echo the confusion about the war legacy happening in the minds of the protagonists.
I took this novel with me to Germany, where I read it and I felt this was quite an engaging novel – well written, for sure – but it was overly contrived. It obliquely tackles the big issues of the legacy of Germany’s role in WW2 and the country’s developing national identity. It then balances these factors against Anna’s heavy-handed deep-dive into Christoph’s family, which made the narrative feel unwieldy. The text is peppered with literary references, which clearly is the author’s forte.
Overall the story was interesting but didn’t hang together, it felt like the author tinkered with the massive subject of German successional/collective guilt and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with and addressing the past) but when the going got tough, the focus switched to the couple dynamics, so it never really went anywhere.
1996: Anna, an American, is aware of her Grandfather’s history, that he was one of the first Americans to enter Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, he looted a large Nazi flag from the property, bundled it up and now, it has been an almost forgotten item in the family’s archive back in the States. At Harvard Anna meets Christoph, a German, and is drawn to him, so much so that she follows him to Bavaria via a Summer placement in Switzerland. But theirs is a sporadic relationship, carried out over a good year. He seems unwilling to return to the States, where Anna’s Jewish housemates struggle to contain their animosity towards him because he is German. Thus, the couple has brief trysts in Germany, with long spells apart. In Germany, Anna feels she has the opportunity to probe his family’s past, always pushing to ascertain details of his grandparents’ role in WW2, set against her own grandfather’s role as an American GI, who entered Dachau just after it was liberated, followed by his entry into the Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden.
This story is inspired by the author’s discovery of a scrapbook which her own grandfather had kept and the American GI in the story is inspired by him and his experiences.
The author writes well and this coming-of-age novel has an interesting premise. The couple visits several places across Germany, mostly with pronounced links to WW2; this gives Anna the opportunity to continue her relentless drilling into his family’s past. Each new adventure inevitably circles back to the default setting of WW2 and, after a while, this feels like quite a forced device. Issues of shame, individual/collective culpability and national guilt are fleetingly addressed time and again, and the question is raised of how much the individual in modern Germany (in 1996, that is) should spend contemplating the past. The debate around atonement becomes quite the Leitmotif.
The individual characters of Anna and Christoph aren’t particularly well developed and the relationship hasn’t been sufficiently deeply set by Chapter 3 (p21), so it is a surprise when Anna muses “I was becoming tired of Christoph’s moods“. Yes, he has been inattentive at times but there really wasn’t enough depth for the reader to warrant such an observation. In psychological terms Christoph seems to have an avoidant personality and Anna’s flatmates keep warning her off him.
They travel to Nuremberg, where she is regaled with the story of Kaspar Hauser (which possibly felt like padding), they visit the Dürer house and the Palace of Justice, where the Nazi trials were held. Generally, as they travel around, there is a nice sense of Germany as a backdrop.
On one visit, they travel the 4 hours to Hamburg by train (just after Anna has arrived into Frankfurt from America) and they arrive for a late lunch (it would have to be very late, I think), they then visit the city, they go to the St Nikolai Memorial and then have dinner with Christoph’s parents, and only then head out to the Christmas Markets (which tend to close on the early side each day). The activities on this particular day felt impossibly crammed into what felt like an unrealistic timescale and I couldn’t get my head around the timeline. It was at this point that I felt a firm editing hand needed to intervene, especially as there were certain German words throughout the text that appeared with capital letters, but others nouns were left in lower case (which should have been upper case) like lebkuchen, weissbier.
In one of the flashbacks to the end of WW2, the author describes a package being handed by an American to a German, which included antibiotic ointment; that, however, wasn’t developed until the mid 1950s.
The story is written without speech marks, which on the one hand makes it a bit hard to read as conversations cross into description and it can take a couple of moments to figure out who is speaking; on the other, perhaps. it is a deliberate ploy to echo the confusion about the war legacy happening in the minds of the protagonists.
I took this novel with me to Germany, where I read it and I felt this was quite an engaging novel – well written, for sure – but it was overly contrived. It obliquely tackles the big issues of the legacy of Germany’s role in WW2 and the country’s developing national identity. It then balances these factors against Anna’s heavy-handed deep-dive into Christoph’s family, which made the narrative feel unwieldy. The text is peppered with literary references, which clearly is the author’s forte.
Overall the story was interesting but didn’t hang together, it felt like the author tinkered with the massive subject of German successional/collective guilt and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with and addressing the past) but when the going got tough, the focus switched to the couple dynamics, so it never really went anywhere.
July 27, 2025
This book had me thinking and reflecting deeply. A young American graduate falls in love with a German man in the 1990‘s. She goes to visit him a few times. It’s the story of their complicated love but also a story about history. The main focus of the book is around the Second World War.
I love a book that really makes me think and want to talk about the topic. This has definitely done that.
It’s hard to really explain the feelings this book has invoked in me. There were the obviously poignant retellings of a very horrible history and the witness accounts of men liberating concentration camps for example. But there was also the question around whether generations born long after the Second World War should feel responsible for that history. It’s such a grey area, and just so very difficult to answer. It was quite hard for me to read and think about how people with families who have been directly affected by atrocities committed by German people at the time still feel very strongly about Germany as a country and their people now (or in the 90‘s as portrayed in the book). Which I can absolutely, deeply understand and at the same time it feels strange to carry this when I personally don’t feel so far removed from the actions of people in charge of Germany before my grandparents were even born. You can see how it is such a difficult thing and I’m not sure there is a right answer.
I’ve spoken a lot about the Second World War with my husband, him being English and me being German. I showed him places in Germany relevant to those times and we speak about this a lot. It’s very important, not always easy and the areas are just so grey.
There are many more aspects of the books that made me think very deeply but it’s just too much to put in a review.
This novel is incredibly well researched, and I am very impressed by the portrayal of German culture too. Whilst fictional, a lot of this book is based on real events and places which makes this so very real.
It did take me a while to get into the book and sometimes it felt a lot like a history lesson. But I didn’t really mind that. There was so much in there that just really made me pause and reflect. A very haunting, compassionate and meaningful novel.
I love a book that really makes me think and want to talk about the topic. This has definitely done that.
It’s hard to really explain the feelings this book has invoked in me. There were the obviously poignant retellings of a very horrible history and the witness accounts of men liberating concentration camps for example. But there was also the question around whether generations born long after the Second World War should feel responsible for that history. It’s such a grey area, and just so very difficult to answer. It was quite hard for me to read and think about how people with families who have been directly affected by atrocities committed by German people at the time still feel very strongly about Germany as a country and their people now (or in the 90‘s as portrayed in the book). Which I can absolutely, deeply understand and at the same time it feels strange to carry this when I personally don’t feel so far removed from the actions of people in charge of Germany before my grandparents were even born. You can see how it is such a difficult thing and I’m not sure there is a right answer.
I’ve spoken a lot about the Second World War with my husband, him being English and me being German. I showed him places in Germany relevant to those times and we speak about this a lot. It’s very important, not always easy and the areas are just so grey.
There are many more aspects of the books that made me think very deeply but it’s just too much to put in a review.
This novel is incredibly well researched, and I am very impressed by the portrayal of German culture too. Whilst fictional, a lot of this book is based on real events and places which makes this so very real.
It did take me a while to get into the book and sometimes it felt a lot like a history lesson. But I didn’t really mind that. There was so much in there that just really made me pause and reflect. A very haunting, compassionate and meaningful novel.
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