Tag: historical fiction

#BookReview The Garden of Angels by David Hewson @rararesources @severnhouse

whatcathyreadnext

The Garden of Angels

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Garden of Angels by David Hewson. My thanks to Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Severn House for my digital review copy via NetGalley. The Garden of Angels is available now in hardback, ebook and as an audio book. Do also check out the posts by my tour buddies for today, Amanda at Ginger Book Geek and Els at B For BookReview.

The Garden of AngelsAbout the Book

The Palazzo Colombina is home to the Uccello family: three generations of men, trapped together in the dusty palace on Venice’s Grand Canal. Awkward fifteen-year-old Nico. His distant, business-focused father. And his beloved grandfather, Paolo. Paolo is dying. But before he passes, he has secrets he’s waited his whole life to share.

​When a Jewish classmate is attacked by bullies, Nico just watches – earning him a week’s suspension and a typed, yellowing manuscript from his frail Nonno Paolo. A history lesson, his grandfather says. A secret he must keep from his father. A tale of blood and madness . . .

​Nico is transported back to the Venice of 1943, an occupied city seething under its Nazi overlords, and to the defining moment of his grandfather’s life: when Paolo’s support for a murdered Jewish woman brings him into the sights of the city’s underground resistance. Hooked and unsettled, Nico can’t stop reading – but he soon wonders if he ever knew his beloved grandfather at all.

Format: Hardcover (320 pages)         Publisher: Severn House
Publication date: 29th January 2021 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find The Garden of Angels on Goodreads

Purchase links
Hive | Amazon UK
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

I was drawn to this book partly by its subject matter but also by its setting. I’ve been lucky enough to visit Venice on a couple of occasions, although I can’t claim the intimate knowledge of the city the author clearly possesses. I’ll admit that, because of its unique location, it hadn’t occurred to me that Venice would have been occupied by the Nazis during the Second World War. Therefore, this was an aspect of the novel I found especially intriguing.

The story of the wartime experiences of Nico’s grandfather, Paolo Uccello, and his fellow Venetians is revealed in instalments to Nico, by way of a series of letters. A little confusingly Paolo’s recollections are related in the third person, as if he was an observer rather than a participant, and include scenes and conversations to which he was not a party. Leaving that aside, the story Paolo tells is one of fear, betrayal, collaboration and wartime atrocities but also of courage.

As Nico learns more about Paolo’s experiences, he wanders the streets of Venice visiting – and photographing – some of the locations mentioned by his grandfather, such as the building that housed the SS headquarters and the site of the Jewish ghetto. He is struck by the seeming unawareness of present day visitors to the terrible events that took place in those same places fifty years before.  Seeing a group of children playing football at one site, he has to stop himself shouting ‘Don’t you know what happened here? Can’t you feel the traces of all that memory?’.  As it happens, the Venetians who lived through that time, including the family’s housekeeper, seem equally unwilling to talk about what went on during the occupation. Nico’s wanderings through the city give him a growing sense of past and present eliding. ‘More and more I felt I was walking through two cities at the same time.  The Venice I’d grown up in.  The different, darker, violent city that Nonno Paolo had known when he wasn’t much older than me.’  

I liked the way his grandfather’s story makes Nico reflect on how war can make people behave.  ‘That was one of the lessons he was trying to teach me: evil wasn’t special. There was no need for extraordinary villains with scars, and wicked, dark glints in their eyes.  It was ordinary, mundane, a part of the city, a lurking virus within us all.’  A good example in the book of the ‘ordinary monsters’ is the character Luca Alberti, a Venetian policeman who finds himself collaborating with the Nazis. There are plenty of other memorable characters too such as Catholic priest, Filippo Garzone, and Aldo Diamante, appointed by the Nazis as leader of the Jewish community in Venice, who becomes faced with an impossible dilemma.

The book displays the author’s impressive knowledge of Venice, especially the ‘off-the-beaten track’ areas rarely visited by tourists.  I loved the imaginative ways Venice, ‘the city on the water’, was described, including as ‘a precious gilded prison’ and ‘the louche old lady of the lagoon’.  Not only did I learn a lot about the history of Venice and Italian politics of the period but also about the process of weaving a kind of velvet known as soprarizzo using a Jacquard loom. You can find out more about the latter here.

The Garden of Angels is both an intriguing wartime story and a great advertisement for the wonderful city of Venice.  It’s a trip to put on your bucket list.  In the meantime, why not visit in literary form by adding The Garden of Angels to your TBR pile.

In three words: Atmospheric, intriguing, dramatic

Try something similar: The Diplomat’s Wife by Michael Ridpath

Follow this blog via Bloglovin

david hewsonAbout the Author

David Hewson is a former journalist with The Times, The Sunday Times and the Independent. He is the author of more than twenty-five novels, including his Rome-based Nic Costa series which has been published in fifteen languages, and his Amsterdam-based series featuring detective Pieter Vos. He has also written three acclaimed adaptations of the Danish TV series, The Killing. He lives near Canterbury in Kent.

Connect with David
Website | Twitter

The Garden of Angels Full Tour Banner

#BookReview Nick by Michael Farris Smith @noexitpress

whatcathyreadnext2 Comments

NickAbout the Book

Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby’s world, he was at the centre of a very different story – one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I. Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed first-hand, Nick embarks on a redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance – doomed from the very beginning – to the dizzying frenzy of New Orleans, rife with its own flavour of debauchery and violence.

Charged with enough alcohol, heartbreak and yearning to transfix even the heartiest of golden age scribes, Nick reveals the man behind the narrator who has captivated readers for decades.

Format: Hardcover (320 pages)           Publisher: No Exit Press
Publication date: 25th February 2021 Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

Find Nick on Goodreads

Purchase links
Bookshop.org
Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Hive | Amazon UK
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The year 2021 marks the 125th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birth and his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, coming out of copyright in the USA. Nick is described by the publishers as Michael Farris Smith’s attempt to pull Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, ‘out of the shadows and into the spotlight’.

In his foreword to Nick, Farris Smith notes that, in The Great Gatsby, Nick provides very little information about himself. Essentially, the reader knows only that he fought in the Great War, he was from the Midwest and that he was turning thirty years of age. Using this sparse information as a starting point, the author sets out to imagine the events that shaped the character of Nick Carraway the reader will meet in The Great Gatsby.

Of the three things mentioned above, the fact he fought in the Great War is the biggest focus of Nick. Indeed, the scenes in the trenches of the Western Front were the most compelling parts of the book for me. There is a particularly gripping episode in which Nick joins the rest of his troop on an advance over rain-soaked terrain in a forest held by German forces. Later, Nick volunteers to work in the tunnels being excavated under the enemy trenches, becoming a “listener” whose role is to detect the sound of German troops or tunnellers. In a nod to his future role as narrator of The Great Gatsby, he proves himself an exceptionally good listener.  Later in the book, whilst working for a brief time in the family hardware shop, the author has him become a good observer too, noticing the mannerisms of customers and able to predict their needs before they express them.

Although the sections set in the war were descriptively the most compelling parts of the book for me, of course there is no sense of jeopardy for Nick himself, only for others around him; we know Nick will survive to appear in The Great Gatsby. What the author can do is explore the experiences that may have shaped him. Farris Smith does so by imagining a love affair between Nick and a woman called Ella he meets while on leave in Paris, and by having Nick haunted in the years to come by traumatic wartime memories that manifest themselves in nightmares and panic attacks.

There is very little reference to Nick’s early life in the Midwest, except for some brief childhood memories of his father’s despair at Nick’s mother’s periods of depression. Rather than returning home after the war, there is a long section of the book in which Nick travels to New Orleans. The destination is chosen on a whim reflecting the restlessness at the heart of his character. There he becomes involved with Judah, a wounded veteran of the Great War. ‘And if there is one thing the lost are able to recognise it is the others who are just as wounded and wandering.’  Some of the melodramatic events that follow felt a little out of character with the rest of the book for me although the atmosphere of the period is vividly recreated.

Nick is not so much a prequel to The Great Gatsby as a homage to Fitzgerald’s novel. Indeed, it’s only in the very final pages that Nick arrives at the location of the opening scenes of that book. This means readers unfamiliar with The Great Gatsby will find themselves at no disadvantage and can base their judgment of Nick solely on how successfully they feel Farris Smith has created a story about a young man who just happens to be called Nick.  For readers like myself who have read Fitzgerald’s original, it has definitely made me curious to read The Great Gatsby again and pay more attention to its narrator.

My thanks to Lisa at No Exit Press for my proof copy of Nick. You can watch a replay of the online launch of Nick during which Michael Farris Smith talked about the book with Alison Flood of The Guardian by clicking on the following link:  https://www.crowdcast.io/e/book-launch-of-nick-by 

In three words: Dramatic, intriguing, assured

Try something similar: The Road To Grantchester by James Runcie

Follow this blog via Bloglovin

Michael Farris SmithAbout the Author

Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, Southern Living, Book Riot, and numerous others, and have been named Indie Next List, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. He has been a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, the Gold Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix des Lectrices in France, and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun, and more. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters. (Photo credit: Publisher author page)

Connect with Michael
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram