Featuring new fiction from Anne Berest, Ellen Keith, Bryn Turnbull and Luis Alberto Urrea

The Postcard

By Anne Berest, translated by Tina Kover

Europa Editions, 475 pages, $39.95

In January 2003, an unsigned postcard addressed to Anne Berest’s mother Lélia arrives at her Paris home with only Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques scrawled on it, the names of her maternal grandparents, her aunt and her uncle. All of them died at Auschwitz in 1942.

Lélia’s mother Myriam wasn’t on the roundup list due to her married name and, as a result, her own life was “spun from that impossibly slender thread of luck.” The sole survivor of her family by war’s end, Anne’s grandmother never set foot in a synagogue again. For Myriam, “God died in the death camps.”

In this riveting, poignant and unflinching autofiction, Berest (the great-granddaughter of painter Francis Picabia and Resistance fighter Gabriële Buffet) pursues the mystery ruthlessly.

Exploring inherited trauma grounded in her own Jewish heritage, she observes that she carries within her “the memory of an experience of danger so violent that sometimes I think I really lived it myself.”

This brilliant novel, at times harrowing in its telling, is surely one of the finest of the year.

The Dutch Orphan

By Ellen Keith

HarperCollins Publishers, 388 pages, $22.99

During the Nazi occupation of Holland, the formerly neutral Dutch had to choose between collaboration or resistance in order to survive.

Sisters Johanna Vos — a jazz singer with Jewish musician friends — and Liesbeth de Wit — a columnist with a pragmatic eye for “fashion on the ration” — find themselves on opposing sides due to the interests of their husbands. Willem Vos, a veterinarian at the Amsterdam zoo, helps to secretly shelter families in plain sight, while Maurits de Wit, a pharmacist, becomes enamoured with the influence of the fascist National Socialist Party, a racist group of men who speak of Hitler as if he were “some chum from school, the popular boy, the star athlete.”

In this engaging sophomore novel Ellen Keith explores the resilience of ordinary people who step up to do what is morally right during extraordinary times.

The Paris Deception

By Bryn Turnbull

Mira, 464 pages, $23.99

In 1940 occupied Paris, two intrepid young women — art conservator Sophie Dix and painter Fabienne Brandt — put their differences aside to become allies to preserve important and valuable paintings that the Germans have looted from museums and private collections. Deciding that “legality is something of a fluid concept in times of war,” they embark on a forgery mission to replicate as many pieces as possible to preserve real paintings before the Nazis transport them out of France.

These richly-conceived fictional characters are supported by actual historic figures including gallerist Paul Rosenberg (who exhibited Picasso and Miró) and Resistance operative Rose Valland who works with Sophie at the Jeu de Paume museum.

Flashback sequences to 1930s Germany where Sophie was indoctrinated in the Hitler Youth movement and to rural France where Fabienne pushes against familial expectations to continue the wine business show just how far women have come and how committed they are to fight fascism.

Wholly immersive and impeccably researched, Bryn Turnbull’s tale brings the time vividly to life.

Good Night, Irene

Luis Alberto Urrea

Little Brown, 419 pages, $37.00

Twentysomethings Irene Woodward and Dorothy Dunford sign up with the American Red Cross in 1944 as part of the Clubmobile Corps, a little-known unit of women assigned to serve coffee and donuts from trucks to weary GIs on the Front. Their role: “summon comfort in the face of suffering and chaos.” They become “big sister, girl next door, mom or sweetheart,” acting also as nurse or confessor as circumstance demands.

Post-D-Day they witness heartbreak upon heartbreak from razed villages infested with rats to corpse-strewn fields to the unspeakable horror of Buchenwald. But, they are “beyond wonder, beyond awe, beyond even fear.”

A pitch-perfect coda fifty years later wholly satisfies.

Splendidly imagined, exquisitely written, this gutting and glorious story enthralls on every page.

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