Hamlet's Children
Description
A riveting new novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Kluger. A literary treasure for all World War II buffs set in Denmark during the 5-year Nazi occupation, Hamlet's Children is a major new historical novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Kluger.
When grave family misfortune leaves thirteen-year-old Terry Sayre without parents or relatives to care for him in the summer of 1939, his only option to elude foster care by strangers is to accept asylum abroad with his mother's Danish kin, people he met only briefly as a child. Despondent but not given to self-pity, Terry begins life anew sheltered in his formidable grandparents' home in a coastal town an hour's drive from Copenhagen, Denmark's capital. But within months of his arrival, the Second World War breaks out. Serving as the emotional prism through which that monumental struggle is refracted, Terry's older self recounts his precarious coming of age as an alien marooned in a disconcerting new land throughout its long national nightmare - an ordeal none of his peers was enduring back home safe in America.
Spared the savage treatment Nazi Germany dealt other countries it conquered, Denmark was allowed to remain nominally self-governing. Good fortune, though, did not allow the proud, peaceloving little kingdom to escape the toll the war took on its people's collective soul. Fearful of openly resisting or secretly harassing the German occupation at risk of lethal reprisals, Denmark made a complicitous pact with its tormentors to feed and equip their armed forces. As a result, the Danes suffered from self-hatred at home and contempt abroad as a land of shameless collaborators bartering their country's honor to survive the war unbloodied.
HAMLET'S CHILDREN by Richard Kluger is the story of a young American's wrenching assimilation with his Danish relatives and their friends and of how he is pinioned in the same cruel vise with his adopted countrymen as they cunningly attempt to subvert the Germans' iron grip on their kingdom. Paramount on this agenda of defiance is the Danes' persistent effort to keep their Jewish neighbors out of the Nazis' murderous hands. Vibrant with memorable characters and fraught with tension, this artfully crafted narrative, both heartbreaking and uplifting, is a testament to the human spirit in its bleakest hours.
Fiction.
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About the Author
A native of Paterson, N.J., Richard Kluger grew up in Manhattan, graduated from Princeton University, where he chaired The Daily Princetonian, and as a young journalist worked for The Wall Street Journal, the pre-Murdoch New York Post and Forbes magazine before becoming the last literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune. When the Tribune folded, Kluger entered the book industry, rising to executive editor of Simon and Schuster, editor-in-chief of Atheneum, and publisher of Charterhouse Books. Of Kluger's seven novels previous to HAMLET'S CHILDREN, the most widely read have been Members of the Tribe, about which the Chicago Tribune wrote, "This excellent novel is a sobering story . . . filled with anguish and a sense of injustice, of hopes carefully nurtured and casually betrayed," and The Sheriff of Nottingham, which Time called "richly imagined and beautifully written." He also co-authored two novels with his wife Phyllis, a fiber artist and herself the author of two books on needlework design. The Klugers live in Berkeley.
