INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
GoodReads Choice Awards Semifinalist
"Moving . . . a plot that surprises and devastates."--New York Times
Book Review
"A masterful epic."--People magazine
"Mesmerizing . . . The Women in the Castle stands tall among the
literature that reveals new truths about one of history's most tragic
eras."--USA Today
Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold
Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once
played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive
story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined--an
affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of
the New York Times Notable Book The Hazards of Good Breeding.
Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany's defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns
to the once-grand castle of her husband's ancestors, an imposing stone
fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a
resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf
Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband's
brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow
resistance widows.
First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest
childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make
their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin,
where Martin's mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into
the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another
resister's wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of
the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war.
As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her
husband's resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and
circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that
the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has
become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark
passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women
must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives
before, during, and after the war--each with their own unique share of
challenges.
Written with the devastating emotional power of The Nightingale,
Sarah's Key, and The Light Between Oceans, Jessica Shattuck's
evocative and utterly enthralling novel offers a fresh perspective on
one of the most tumultuous periods in history. Combining piercing social
insight and vivid historical atmosphere, The Women in the Castle is a
dramatic yet nuanced portrait of war and its repercussions that explores
what it means to survive, love, and, ultimately, to forgive in the wake
of unimaginable hardship.
