The Dower House

November 15, 2011
A group of artists and artisans try communal living at a country house in 1947 England. Felix Breit is a well-respected sculptor in prewar Europe. Living in Paris after a fight with his father, he is shocked when he is arrested and sent to Mauthausen. It seems that his grandfather, a second-rate artist and vocal anti-Semite, was actually born a Jew. So Felix is a quarter Jewish, enough for the Nazi death list. Two architects he meets when he's rescued from Mauthausen invite him to England, where he takes up their offer of an apartment and workshop in a sprawling Hertfordshire mansion. A chance meeting in the Victoria and Albert Museum brings him a lover and career-builder in the delightful form of Faith Bullen-ffitch. Among his neighbors in the building is an American bridegroom of Marianne von Ritter, whose Nazi-loving Swedish parents sent her to work in Germany; an English architect whose French wife despises Marianne; and several other ill-assorted couples. Felix is immensely attracted to Angela Wirth, a Ravensbrück survivor, who worked for the Nazis as a sound recorder. After secretly recording the meeting about the Final Solution, she made a transcript that she sent to the Communists, earning herself a spot in a death camp. This series debut from prolific Macdonald (Rose of Nancemellin, 2001, etc.) explores the dynamics of the relationships between the Europeans and their very different English hosts. It's all heartbreaking and romantic, with intimations of future happiness.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 15, 2011
Severn House adds to its engaging list of historical romances with the first in a new series by best-selling British author MacDonald set during the devastating aftermath of WWII. Jewish sculptor Felix Breit has survived Nazi medical experiments at the Mauthausen concentration camp. He reaches London in 1947, where two architect friends, sensing that the war and its atrocities will utterly change humankind's perspectives on our capacity for good and unspeakable evil, rent a 60-room country manor, the Dower House, in the hope of establishing a commune dedicated to a postwar renaissance. Their community of the future will include working-class people, and all will strive for the next stage of civilization. There Felix finds himself warning a Frenchwoman about the scars she'll get if she keeps picking at the wound, thus establishing the tale's moral center amid postwar tension. Blending a well-researched setting with an unusual story line, MacDonald captures the era's specifics and reaches for universal truths while probing injured psyches in a damaged world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)