Overview

Inspired by the stories told by her father about his German childhood and letters between her grandparents that were hidden in an attic wall for fifty years, Motherland is a novel that attempts to reckon with the paradox of the author's father--a product of her grandparents' fiercely protective love--and their status as passive Nazi-sympathizers known as Mitläufer. At the center of Motherland lies the Kappus family: Frank is a reconstructive surgeon who lost his beloved wife in childbirth. Two months later, just before being drafted into medical military service, Frank marries a young woman charged with looking after the surviving baby and his two grieving sons. Alone in the house, Liesl attempts to keep the children fed with dwindling food supplies, safe from the constant Allied air attacks and the tides of desperate refugees flooding their town. When one child begins to mentally unravel, Liesl must discover the source of the boy's infirmity or lose him forever to Hadamar, the infamous hospital for unfit children. Bearing witness to the shame and courage of Third Reich families during the devastating final days of the war, each family member's fateful choice leads the listener deeper into questions of complicity and innocence, and to the novel's heartbreaking and unforgettable conclusion.

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9781665188975

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Maria Hummel is the author of Still Lives; Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year; House and Fire; and Wilderness Run. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize, Narrative, the Sun, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. She worked as a writer/editor at MOCA in Los Angeles, then received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and taught there for many years. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, and lives in Vermont with her husband and sons. Christa Lewis has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. She is a classically trained actress with a four-year conservatory training in voice and acting. She has a smart and funny vibe, but can also meet the moment in straightforward or somber works of nonfiction thanks to a seventeen-year stint as a newsreader. Christa speaks accent-free German fluently and offers a variety of believable accents and dialects. Her narrations are well received--there have been seven Earphones awards across a variety of genres--YA, literary fiction, biography and memoir--a 2019 SOVAS Voice Arts Award in Biography and two Audie nominations. Pippa Jayne was the Sultry Listeners' Award Winner 2019 in the Erotica category.

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