From the award-winning author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, a stunning debut novel: the story of an intense first love haunted by history and family memory, inspired by the startling WWII scrapbook of Clark’s own grandfather, hidden in an attic until after his death.
“An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love.” —Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots
The traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism echo and reverberate through the present in this story of a lifechanging seduction.
Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation’s recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen.
As Anna travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, her perspective is powerfully interrupted by chapters that follow both of their grandfathers during the war. One witnesses the plight of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation and helps capture Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, while the other fights for Nazi Germany. Their fragmented stories haunt Anna and her lover two generations later—and may still tear them apart.
Not a “World War Two novel” in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming tale of first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies and historical conscience.
Not a “World War Two novel” in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming tale of first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies and historical conscience.
“A potent story of two lovers, one American and one German, reckoning with the legacy of WWII … It’s a revelation.” —Starred review, Publishers Weekly
“Clark writes about this milieu with grace and elegance, capturing Anna’s emotional frustration in acute detail… Clark ultimately sells the idea that a present-day relationship can be shaped by forces that reside in a past we’d prefer to ignore.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Heather Clark’s THE SCRAPBOOK is a masterpiece. This beautifully crafted, quietly devastating love story reminds us of the epic impact of the Second World War across continents and through generations, its scars perhaps most poignantly felt in the intimate interactions between two solitary people.”
—Rebecca Donner, New York Times bestselling author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days
“Through an exquisitely observed love affair, Clark explores how the Nazis’ lingering legacy can still haunt the lives of those born long after the war. A stunningly good novel.”
—Julia Boyd, author of A Village in the Third Reich
“An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love. With a biographer’s eye for detail and a novelist’s grasp of human frailty, The Scrapbook traces the fault lines between past and present, between nations and individuals, revealing how history lingers—not in grand narratives, but in intimate entanglements.”
—Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots
More about THE SCRAPBOOK:
The traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism echo and reverberate through the present in this story of a life changing seduction.
Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation’s recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen.
As Anna travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, her perspective is powerfully interrupted by chapters that follow both of their grandfathers during the war. One witnesses the plight of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation and helps capture Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, while the other fights for Nazi Germany. Their fragmented stories haunt Anna and her lover two generations later—and may still tear them apart.
Author Bio:
HEATHER CLARK earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in English from Oxford University. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; the Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography; a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship; a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York; and a Visiting U.S. Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library.
A former Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath; The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972. Red Comet was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize in Biography, and was a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2021. Red Comet was also a "Book of the Year" in The Guardian, The Times (London), The Daily Telegraph, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, The Times of India, Trouw (Netherlands), and elsewhere, and has been translated into five languages. Clark's work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Harvard Review, Time, Air Mail, Lit Hub, and The Times Literary Supplement. She lives outside of New York City.
THE SCRAPBOOK Q&A
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Leslie Rossman
510-847-7477
www.openbookpublicity.com
THE SCRAPBOOK Q&A
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Leslie Rossman
510-847-7477
www.openbookpublicity.com
