Midnight Train to Prague
With shades of Amy Bloom's Away, Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, and Shirley Hazzard's classic The Bay of Noon, Carol Windley's breakout is a timeless tale of friendship, romance, betrayal, and survival set in a Europe torn apart by world war.
The acclaimed author of Home Schooling returns with Midnight Train to Prague, a timeless tale of friendship, romance, betrayal, and survival that spans the turbulent decades of the twentieth century, through two world wars and between countries and continents.
In 1927, as Natalia Faber travels from Berlin to Prague with her mother, their train is delayed in Saxon Switzerland. In the brief time the train is idle, Natalia learns the truth about her father--who she believed died during her infancy--and meets a remarkable woman named Dr. Magdalena Schaeffer, whose family will become a significant part of her future. Shaken by these events, Natalia arrives at a spa on the shore of Lake Hevíz in Hungary. Here, she meets Count Miklós Andorján, a journalist and adventurer. The following year, they will marry.
Years later, Germany has invaded Russia. When Miklós fails to return from the eastern front, Natalia goes to Prague to wait for him. With a pack of tarot cards, she sets up shop as a fortune teller, and she meets Anna Schaeffer, the daughter of the woman she met decades earlier on that stalled train. The Nazis accuse Natalia of spying, and she is sent to a concentration camp. Though they are separated, her friendship with Anna grows as they fight to survive and to be reunited with their families.
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Carol Windley is the author of the novel Breathing Under Water and two story collections: Giller Prize finalist Home Schooling and Visible Light, which won the Bumbershoot/Weyerhaeuser Prize and was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award. She lives on Vancouver Island.
Praise for Midnight Train to Prague
Shortlisted for the Vine Awards
"An original and compelling story, told with vivid detail and a richness in setting that I absorbed in one sitting. Windley's characters are symbols of a disappearing era, as they navigate the dramatically shifting political landscape of central Europe teetering between wars."--Ellen Keith, bestselling author of The Dutch Wife
"While there is certainly a place for wartime fiction that focuses on romance or intrepid female spies, novels like Windley's offer a deeper, more thought-provoking examination of a time that is on the cusp of slipping from modern memory. As the number of people who lived through the atrocities dwindles, well-written books like Midnight Train to Prague are a reminder to the rest of us that we must never forget."--Quill & Quire
Praise for Homeschooling
"Carol Windley's writing has a unique power, a perfect combination of delicacy, intensity, and fearless imagination."--Alice Munro
"Windley's writing is calm and at times hypnotic, and her prose rhythms paint pictures of their own; she knows how to create the restful quiet of gentle waves breaking on a beach . . . startlingly lovely."--Seattle Times
"Hints of Henry James . . . the opening lines of the astonishing title story are a high-wire act of narrative prestidigitation, mimicking the fault lines of memory and the compensatory gift of reinvention."--Elle
"Language is wielded like a slender blade in these stories . . . swiftly piercing a perception and pinning it to the page."--Boston Globe
"Beautiful, haunting stories--intelligent, heartfelt, and true."--Alice Hoffman
