About the Book
When his nation is invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy, a well-intentioned man persuades his wife that they should give temporary shelter to a young girl who is at school with their daughter. He has no idea that the girl belongs to a community against whom the invader intends to commit genocide.
Days stretch into weeks and then months while the enemy’s pitiless hatred of the girl’s community puts all of the family in danger. Nobody outside the family can be trusted with the dangerous secret and the threat from outside unlocks a darkness that threatens to derail them all.
Format: eARC (175 pages) Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication date: 1st May 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction
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My Review
Having really enjoyed The Quincunx, Charles Palliser’s debut novel, which I read way back in 2018, I jumped at the chance to read Sufferance even though isn’t published until May. Rather than the huge chunk of Dickens-style epic of The Quincunx, Sufferance is a short novel but no less absorbing.
It’s set in an unnamed country in Eastern Europe that has been occupied and partitioned by an enemy during the Second World War. In fact the country is just the first of the many unnamed things in the novel. We never learn the name of the narrator, his wife, his two daughters or even the young girl he takes into his home in an act of (misplaced, as it turns out) charity. Or perhaps it’s self-interest as she belongs to a wealthy family – or so it appears. What we do know is that her surname marks her out as a member of an ironically named ‘protected community’ whose day to day lives and livelihoods are being progressively constrained by the occupying power. Again, the community is not named, the reader instead left to draw their own conclusions.
An unsettling air of menace permeates the book which only increases as our narrator finds he has placed himself and his family in danger by taking in the girl. His role as a government official tasked with enforcing some of the occupying power’s increasingly severe actions against the girl’s community complicates things further. He also faces his wife and daughters’ growing unhappiness with the girl’s presence. Spoiled and prone to untruthfulness, she is not a child it is easy to love.
Our narrator is forced to take more and more extreme measures to prevent the girl’s presence being discovered by the authorities. It’s difficult not to feel unsettled by some of these thing, and their obvious parallels, but then I think that’s the author’s intention. And to make us question the things we might be prepared to do – or not do – in similar circumstances. The simple prose with which the story unfolds only adds to the sinister feel of this skilfully crafted, dark little tale.
I received a digital review copy courtesy of Guernica Editions via NetGalley.
In three words: Chilling, intriguing, suspenseful
Try something similar: Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson
About the Author
Charles Palliser is an American-born and British-based novelist. He is the author of five previous novels. His most well-known novel, The Quincunx, has sold over a million copies internationally. He lives in London, UK.
What Cathy Read Next... 
Thanks for sharing your review with the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.
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