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The Women of the Castle

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The Women of the Castle

By: Jessica Shattuck
Narrated by: Joan Walker
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Three German women are haunted by the past and their secrets in the devastating aftermath of WWII. A mesmerising story of resistance, forgiveness and the complexity of the human heart.

A resistance widow. A silent co-conspirator. The only one who survived.

Bavaria, Germany. June, 1945. The Third Reich has crumbled. The Russians are coming. Can Marianne von Lingenfels and the women in her care survive and build their ravaged world anew?

Marianne - widow of a resistor to the Nazi regime - returns to the grand, crumbling castle where she once played host to all of German high society. She assembles a makeshift family from the ruins of her husband's movement, rescuing her dearest friend's widow, Benita, from sexual slavery to the Russian army, and Ania from a work camp for political prisoners. She is certain their shared past will bind them together.

But as Benita begins a clandestine relationship and Ania struggles to conceal her role in the Nazi regime, Marianne learns that her clear-cut, highly principled world view has no place in these new, frightening and emotionally charged days. All three women must grapple with the realities they now face, and the consequences of decisions each made in the darkest of times....

Deeply moving and compelling, The Women of the Castle is a heart-wrenching and hopeful tale of secrets and survival, a reckoning and the astonishing power of forgiveness.

©2017 Jessica Shattuck (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Europe Fiction Genre Fiction Germany Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Political War & Military Survival Heartfelt Military War
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The author treads a very tricky lime between evoking the horror of Nazism and the tragedies of stunde null without being unnecessarily gratuitous. She lays it all out without judgement, and really gets into the 'vergangenheitsbewaltigung' mindset of the war generation in Germany (the act of forgetting the past). An absolutely brilliant book.

Evocative and honest without being gratuitous

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