The Women in the Castle, Jessica Shattuck
The Women in the Castle, Jessica Shattuck
57 Rating(s)
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The Women in the Castle

Author: Jessica Shattuck

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

Unabridged: 12 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 03/28/2017


Synopsis

Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they holdSet at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined—an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Hazards of Good Breeding.Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows.First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister’s wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war. As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war—each with their own unique share of challenges. Written with the devastating emotional power of The Nightingale, Sarah’s Key, and The Light Between Oceans, Jessica Shattuck’s evocative and utterly enthralling novel offers a fresh perspective on one of the most tumultuous periods in history. Combining piercing social insight and vivid historical atmosphere, The Women in the Castle is a dramatic yet nuanced portrait of war and its repercussions that explores what it means to survive, love, and, ultimately, to forgive in the wake of unimaginable hardship.

About Jessica Shattuck

Jessica Shattuck is the New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle; The Hazards of Good Breeding, a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award; and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, and Wired, among other publications.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Will on January 12, 2022

Suddenly she saw everything in its harsh, naked state. She felt the pulse of the lives lived inside the mean little house she passed: selfish or generous, kind or unkind, ugly or tolerable, almost all of them sad. And she saw the histories of the people passing by like x-rays stamped on their fa......more

Goodreads review by Always on February 02, 2020

At the end of World War II Marianne von Lingenfels tracks down her childhood friend, Connie Flederman's son Martin and his wife Benita. Marianne had made Connie a promise to take care of his family if anything happened to him. Her husband Albrecht and Connie, as well as various others, had been a pa......more

Goodreads review by Angela M on February 06, 2017

I started reading this a couple of days after Holocaust Remembrance Day and on that day I thought about how it should be remembered more than on just one day each year . This is why I really believe that reading books about WWII and the Holocaust is so important. This book certainly made me remember......more

Goodreads review by Norma ~ The Sisters on April 12, 2025

I found this to be a dramatic and an uniquely told story that gave me a new understanding and a different perspective on this time period of World War II that I have never experienced before while reading a Historical Fiction novel. THE WOMEN IN THE CASTLE by JESSICA SHATTUCK is an intriguing, powerf......more