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, discovered in an attic after his death
Set in the 1990s when Anna, an innocent Harvard senior, falls hard for Christoph, a beautiful German exchange student, the novel explores a lifechanging seduction, and how the traumas of the past, particularly the aftershocks of fascism, echo and reverberate through the present.
Along with Anna's perspective, as she travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, key chapters follow both of their grandfathers during the war, as Clark skillfully evokes their contrasting experiences, whose implications bear on the present story. She writes with beautiful restraint and withheld fury at Anna's grandfather's witnessing of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation, and the atmosphere at Hitler's Eagle's Nest, where the GIs carved their names in the mantelpiece and took photographs. The novel explores how these contexts haunt both Anna and her lover-and may be what will tear them apart.
Not a "WWII novel" in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies, and pierced by historical conscience. 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.
