Stones from the River

From the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of Floating in My Mother's Palm comes a major novel of Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. In historical scope, in moral complexity, in human drama, and in pure storytelling power, Stones from the River is a beautifully crafted and memorable book whose richly drawn characters stay with us long after we turn the last page. Trudi Montag is born during World War I in the small town of Burgdorf on the Rhein river. She is a Zwerg - a dwarf - short, squat, undesirable, different. All her life Trudi yearns to stretch and grow to be like everyone else. But as she matures to become the town's librarian and its unofficial historian, conscience, and purveyor of gossip, she comes to learn that - like the stones at the bottom of the river, which are seen only when one dives deep beneath its surface - being different is a secret everyone shares: her mother, who flees a betrayal into madness and early death; her widowed, celibate father, lame from one war, who attracts the fantasies of many townswomen; her friend Georg, whose mother pretends he's a girl; Hans Malter, the man who cannot acknowledge his feelings for Trudi; his daughter Hanna, who Trudi believes should have been her child; and especially the Jews and other "undesirables" Trudi harbors in her cellar during the Nazi regime. These secrets, which Trudi chooses to tell or to withhold like a master storyteller, reveal the truths of human existence in a complex and tumultuous period. The story of Trudi and the town of Burgdorf is timeless and unforgettable - the story of people both "good" and "bad", ordinary people living in an unforgiving time during which their actions, orinaction, will mark them forever. Trudi is the collective voice of all women who have tried to belong, to fit in. She is the grotesque in all of us, the courageous in all of us. Stones from the River is a moving novel about life during wartimes as well as the years in between. It is also a profound work of deep beauty, humanity, and truth.