Cologne

by Sarah Playdell

Overview

London, l960: Renate von Hasselmann, a nineteen-year-old German au pair, arrives at Victoria Station prepared to meet her new charges, Caroline and Maggie Whitaker. Yet she is ill-prepared for their parents: the mother, Helen, knows more about Nazi Germany than Renate does, and the father, Jack, disarms Renate with his quicksilver charm. In Sarah Pleydell's debut novel "Cologne" (FUZE Publishing), childhood and history collide, blurring the distinctions between victim and victor, ruin and redemption. With delicate humor, Pleydell presents a portrait of a family on the cusp of great social change, while reminding us that the traumas of war revisit the children of the peace.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940015696196
Publisher:	Fuze Publishing, LLC
Publication date:	09/15/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

A graduate of Oxford and London Universities, Sarah Pleydell is an award-winning writer, performer and playwright who teaches English and writing at the University of Maryland. For the past twenty years, she has been a master teaching artist and arts integration specialist, working with institutions that include The Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Luce Institute. In 2000, she won the American Association for Theatre Educators’ award for best book of the year with co-author Victoria Brown. Most recently she wrote the script and played the role of Isadora in Revolutionary: The Life and Times of Isadora Duncan with Word Dance Theater.
Based on her childhood in London, "Cologne" (Fuze Publishing) has been twenty years in the making. It has benefited from fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and input many generous and gifted writers.

Editorial Reviews

In "Cologne", Sarah Pleydell deftly manages to evoke the pain and confusion of childhood sexual abuse and its corollary, extreme family dysfunction, in elegant, finely wrought prose. This is a brave and haunting story that could not be more timely.

author of New York Times best-seller, - Barbara Graham

"Cologne" is a beautifully written, lyrical novel evocative of Virginia Woolf’s finest work. At its center are the Whittaker sisters, as deeply tied to each other by love as by hate-- Maggie still a child, Caroline on the brink of adolescence--both struggling to maintain the delicate balance between innocence and the precocious knowledge with which they are burdened. Theirs is a world not easily forgotten—it so mirrors the larger one in which most women still live.

Professor Emerita, Women’s Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Maryland, author of - Evelyn Torton Beck

In "Cologne", Sarah Pleydell has succeeded in animating her harrowing subject of a family's destruction with the most vivid, delicate, perfect details. This is a wise and subtle novel, masterfully written, as provocative as it is riveting.

MacArthur Fellow, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, author of - Joanna Scott

"Cologne" explores the ways in which a young girl’s private sorrows and redemptions mirror the great historical forces of war and its aftermath. Coming of age just after World War II, -Caroline Whitaker’s family fragments, betrayals threaten to overwhelm her, and her very life depends on the courage she can summon in the ruins of her innocence. "Cologne" is subtle, evocative, and deeply moving, a book that has changed me as only the finest literature can, and must.

author, - Joyce Reiser Kornblatt

This is a crisply and elegantly written short book, with memorable characters, that takes on big personal and historical themes. Set in the early 1960s in a still-exhausted post-war Britain, it tells the story of a troubled English family whose lives are altered by the arrival of a German au pair. The stoic solidity of the mother, the breezy, handsome charm of the father and the precocious curiosity of the girls are no match for this interloper and the history she represents.

The Washington Post - Patrick B. Pexton