The Aftermath

July 22, 2013
Postwar Hamburg is the backdrop for British writer Brook’s (The Testimony of Taliesin Jones) emotionally charged third novel, which is inspired by his family history. British Col. Lewis Morgan is stationed in the German city in 1946. He requisitions a house for his family, but instead of casting out its German owners (the standard procedure), he allows them to remain. Brook’s chilling observations of Hamburg’s defeated inhabitants and “the fantastic destruction that lay all around” are unnerving and riveting. “Feral” children, he writes, beg for cigarettes and chocolates, and “Rubble Runners” clean up the remains of bombed-out buildings in exchange for food vouchers. But the novel’s smaller stage—the home that Morgan; his wife, Rachael; and their son, Edmund, share with Stefan Lubert and his daughter, Freda—tells the bigger story. The blended families are uncomfortable with their new relationship, and the toxic effects of unassuaged grief for lost love ones complicates the situation. Fans of WWII-era historical fiction will be drawn to this novel. First printing of 75,000. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Company.

August 15, 2013
The ruins of post-World War II Germany provide the complicated emotional background to a sensitive but inconsistent story exploring the fallout from epic catastrophe and loss. Like Sadie Jones in Small Wars, Brook (The Testimony of Taliesin Jones, 2001, etc.) approaches history through the differing experiences of a married couple. British colonel Lewis Morgan has been so immersed in war that he has scarcely grieved the loss of his elder son. Now appointed governor of Pinneberg, in the fire-bombed city of Hamburg, and reunited with wife Rachael and younger son Edmund after a 17-month separation, Lewis is billeted in a luxurious art-deco mansion, saving its owner, cultured German architect Stefan Lubert, from eviction by allowing him and his rebellious daughter to live in an upstairs apartment. Rachael, still consumed by grief and "fragile nerves," responds icily to Lubert, at first. Meanwhile, the British, trying to put Germany back on its feet while weeding out the Nazis, are caught between pressure from Russia and the struggle to satisfy the expectations of a victorious but exhausted nation at home. This promising scenario, drawn in part from family history, offers Brook the opportunity for insight and empathy in Lewis, but elsewhere, the psychology and plot developments are patchier. The open-ended conclusion could conceivably lead to a sequel. Uneven storytelling fails to do justice to a fascinating moment in history.

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September 15, 2013
This precisely written novel is loosely based on events in which the English author's forebears were involved. In the immediate aftermath of WWII, as the victorious Allies partition and independently administer a Germany in ruins, English Army Colonel Lewis Morgan, joined by his wife, Rachael, and young child, Edmund, is assigned to take over the luxurious Hamburg home of Stefan Lubert and his teenage daughter, Freda. Rather than displacing them, Morgan generously, though inexplicably, encourages them to stay on and live upstairs, sharing the capacious residence. This is an uneasy arrangement, exacerbated by domestic stress and war-related bitterness: Rachael and Freda still harbor deep resentments, having lost in the bombings, respectively, a son and a mother. Further, the devastated North Sea city is home not only to the occupying British and the defeated, not always clear (of Nazi taint) Germans, but also to feral children roaming the streets, and members of a group ironically characterizing itself as the Resistance, those who have not yet admitted defeat. In this unique historical novel, Brook plays these elements out dramatically and, for the most part, credibly.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2013

Somerset Maugham Award winner Brook is poised to break out with this third novel, with rights sold to 18 countries and film rights sold to Ridley Scott. In 1946, when British colonel Lewis Morgan is tasked with the reconstruction of Hamburg, he moves his family into a beautiful house on the Elbe. But he doesn't evict the owner, and the two families must negotiate profound bitterness to reach some sort of understanding.

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