skeletons at the feast by chris bohjalian

And, as the war had dragged on, the pool of marriage prospects-in Anna’s mind, often enough that meant merely her older brother Werner’s acquaintances-dried up completely. Usually, it was only when one of the local soldiers was home on leave that Anna and her girlfriends ever saw the sorts of young men with whom, in different times, they might have danced. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Skillfully portraying the flesh and blood of history, Chris Bohjalian has crafted a rich tapestry that puts a face on one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies–while creating, perhaps, a masterpiece that will haunt readers for generations. Perhaps not since The English Patient has a novel so deftly captured both the power and poignancy of romance and the terror and tragedy of war.

Their flight will test both Anna’s and Callum’s love, as well as their friendship with Manfred–assuming any of them even survive. And there is a twenty-six-year-old Wehrmacht corporal, who the pair know as Manfred–who is, in reality, Uri Singer, a Jew from Germany who managed to escape a train bound for Auschwitz.Īs they work their way west, they encounter a countryside ravaged by war. There is her lover, Callum Finella, a twenty-year-old Scottish prisoner of war who was brought from the stalag to her family’s farm as forced labor. Read a transcript from the FebruTwitter Book Club with Chris Bohjalian.In January 1945, in the waning months of World War II, a small group of people begin the longest journey of their lives: an attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich, from Warsaw to the Rhine if necessary, to reach the British and American lines.Īmong the group is eighteen-year-old Anna Emmerich, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats. It should be read strictly as a well constructed novel, not necessarily connected to historical fact, even though it is based on a diary. There is tragedy, romance, friendship, violence, many, many deaths until the end, when few characters are left to enjoy the historical peace. The Germans fear the Russians the most, with good reason.Īs fiction there are many coincidences in the interrelationships among the diverse characters with very different backgrounds. Other characters are created to round out the cast. We meet a Jew, who escapes a transport train, and poses as a German soldier. We meet a loyal German family who, at first, do not see that what the Hitler regime is doing is wrong.

The plot is expertly constructed and the characters diverse but carefully intertwined. It can be assumed that the author used material pertaining to the final years of World War II and the Holocaust. The author’s new novel is based on the diary of a friend’s German grandmother, kept from 1920 through 1945.

Skeletons at the feast by chris bohjalian