Monarch's Row

by Stephanie Kallos

From the bestselling author of Broken for You, an exhilarating new novel about a child born into the world of the British Raj and raised largely in seclusion, until an act of violence catapults her into the world—a wartime love triangle, a literary puzzle, and a moving exploration of the power of authorship, for readers of All the Light We Cannot See and A Gentleman in Moscow.

Enid Asquith is born in 1901 into a prominent British family living in Bombay; her congenital facial deformity and her mother’s frail health requires the family to abandon their holdings in India and return to their home in Muswell Hill—a suburb of North London. For her first few years, Enid shares a housebound existence with her chronically ill mother and a distant father; however, possessed of a resilient, curious, and imaginative nature, she experiences no sense of a voracious reader, she is never without the company of imaginary friends, and on occasion, visits from her much-older sister and brother who are away at boarding school. Soon after the sudden death of her mother, Enid is finally able to undergo reparative surgery, and her world begins to open up. But then in 1913, a series of unspeakable events upends life at Muswell House and sends her back into isolation.

When we meet E.M. Joshi, the author of a beloved children’s book series, more than a decade has passed. Joshi is traveling by train from Scotland to London to meet with her publishers to discuss her first book for adults, a wartime novel. Titled The Timid Heart, the novel is a loose retelling of the Cyrano de Bergerac story, set during the Great War, and while on her journey, the author shares the manuscript with a fellow traveler, the mother of a young man who is suffering from the invisible injuries he sustained in that very war. This reader’s feedback will change both the shape of the novel in question, and the course of its author’s life.

Taking us from colonial India to a north London estate, from the trenches of World War I to a military hospital in the English countryside, from a seat on the Flying Scotsman to the corridors of a storied London publishing house, Monarch’s Row is a gloriously inventive work of historical fiction and a powerful testament to the resilience of the human heart.

Genres: Historical Fiction

368 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication April 13, 2027

About the author

Stephanie Kallos spent twenty years in the theatre as an actor and teacher. Her short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received a Raymond Carver Award. Her first novel, BROKEN FOR YOU, received the Pacific Northwest Book Award, the Washington State Book Award, and was chosen by Sue Monk Kidd as the December 2004 selection for "The Today Show." Her second novel, SING THEM HOME, was featured as an IndieBound selection and chosen by Entertainment Weekly as one of the Top Ten Books of 2009. Her third novel, LANGUAGE ARTS, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the spring of 2015. Stephanie lives with her husband and sons in North Seattle.

Reviews

[Angela M · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read the first three novels by Stephanie Kallos and I loved them all. In this her fourth, she illustrates what a versatile writer she is. It feels more expansive and more ambitious than the others and is historical fiction .

A five year old girl, all but imprisoned in her home in London after her family returns from India , to keep anyone from seeing her facial deformity. My heart was broken as Enid’s mean spirited and perhaps ultimately evil sister puts her on display like an act in a carnival show. But Enid is smart and clever and aware of so much going on around her and her optimism is touching reflecting such resilience. She reads and practices her speech and makes friends with Cook, one of the household help. Cook is my favorite character and it burst my heart with joy and sadness as we learn more about him later in the novel .

Once her mother passes away , Enid has an operation that you hope will change her life, but then as the years pass, she endures a horrific and traumatic experience which does change her life forever , more than I imagined until the end of the novel . There’s a novel within the novel , written by Enid, but it’s really more autobiographical telling of her life after she leaves home . I would have preferred a straight narrative without the story within. The novel takes us to the horrors of WWI and the trauma of soldiers returning , so many with facial deformities . There is an epistolary element to it , but I don’t want to give that thread away. The revelations in the end about her family were surprising in a way , but not unexpected. Enid is character whose resilience and strength will make me remember her.


I received a copy of this book from Simon & Schuster through Edelweiss.

[Paul Wagenbreth · Rating 4 out of 5]

His primary obligation, as he sees it, in working with an author, an editor tells the writer/narrator of Stephanie Kallos’s “Monarch’s Row,” is to ensure that the story the writer wants to tell is the one that makes it to the page, that there aren't gaps or interruptions or holes in the cloth – no scenes, say, that are given short shrift or placed offstage when the reader needs to see more of them upfront.
No such issues for me with offstage or absent scenes in Kallos’ novel, though I would have liked to have had spelled out in greater detail the exact genealogy of the novel’s main characters – a chart, perhaps, at novel’s end, though not at the beginning, which would spoil the book's genealogical surprises.
As it was, though, even with some explanatory genealogical material in the body of the novel, I was left scratching my head at novel's end and wondering if there weren’t something I wasn’t “getting” about the book.
That said, though, there was much to like about the novel, with its story as we first get it of a girl born with a facial deformity in 1901 in India to a prominent British family who are prompted after the birth to return to England, where they will live in odd circumstances, with the sickly mother confining herself largely to the upstairs and the father maintaining what seems to be a strange familial-type relationship with the male cook, whom the family has brought back with them from India and whom the mother seems to despise, and an older sister of the disfigured girl who is given to outspoken petty cruelty, and, completing the family dynamic, a brother with whom the disfigured girl feels an affinity but who will become ensnared in the first world war, the stirrings of which we hear all along.
All very intriguing, the story as we initially get it (it will morph into something considerably more intricate), especially with my special interest in the Raj and my own strong interest in writing, which vibrated very much to the “meta-fictional” aspects of the novel, including its extended consideration of the writer-editor relationship – a sort of midwifery, the editor I cited at the beginning intriguingly puts it – and breaking of the fourth wall and story-within-a-story structure and dual story lines and time lines and even an alternative ending reminiscent for me of John Fowles’ “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”
I just wish, though, as I say, that the author could have found a way to make clearer the exact nature of the main characters’ genealogy while not sacrificing the sort of ellipticalness or allusiveness that makes for the appeal of such similarly alluring novels as “The Remains of the Day.”