Jessica Gregson

One of my favorite genres is historical fiction, and one of my favorite composers is Dmitri Shostakovich, with his 7th Symphony being one of my favored pieces. That all gets combined into the wonderful novel After Silence, which tells the story of Leningrad during the siege in WW2, and of the various fictional characters who will eventually play the symphony in Leningrad as a measure of celebration of the city, and as an act of defiance to the Germans.

The horror of the siege - starvation, death, aerial bombardments - is brought home extraordinarily by the author. Her descritions at times are so vivid that I felt as if I were living through the terror. Yet the characters are resilient in their own way. We meet them not only during the siege, but also learn their background stories. My favorite was Dima, the young blind violinist who is a genius with his instrument. The end of the book is the performance of the 7th, and the beauty of the narrative is a pleasure to read.

My only quibble is that the book is a little too long. I felt that some sections could have been tightened up, but this didn’t detract from my enjoyment of After Silence.

My thanks to Deixis Press and to Netgalley for providing an ARC of After Silence.… (mere)

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3814068.html

This is an intensely told tale of two Turkish ice-cream sellers and the young Irish woman who befriends them in the Australian outback during the first world war. Things go downhill very rapidly after Gallipoli - even the Turks' fellow Muslims, mostly Arabs from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, start to shun them - and the situation accelerates to a dramatic ending based on a real historical incident. A grim story told with a very human touch.… (mere)

The Angel Makers is based on an almost unbelievable true story, set in a small Hungarian village during WWI.
After the men leave to fight the women realize many of them are happier without their oppressive husbands. They form bonds with each other and with some Italian prisoners of war. Sari is the strong main character, a mere teenager with a knowledge of herbs and healing that make some suspect her of witchcraft, but the village midwife takes her in. The story tells how Sari first poisons her abusive husband, Ferenc when he returns and then gets trapped into helping other women off theirs. I can’t help but feel sorry for Ferenc who was obviously traumatized by years of trench warfare; although he treats Sari cruelly when he returns.
Back then (and to some extent still now) some women had limiting choices, others in this story merely found their men inconvenient.
An engrossing read – I’m tempted to give her 5 stars instead of 4 ( if only there was a 4.5!).… (mere)