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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9781665188982

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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. The narrator of over 150 audiobooks, Christa Lewis is a 2019 Voice Arts Award-winning narrator, a 2018 Audie Award finalist, and a 2018 Listener's Choice finalist. She has been featured in AudioFile magazine and earned multiple Earphones Awards for recordings that have become Audible bestsellers in YA and literary fiction. Christa is a classically trained actress. She got her start as a newsreader for international broadcaster DW-TV, and is featured on hundreds of cartoons, museum guides, and documentaries. She also regularly contributes to award-winning podcasts. Christa speaks accent-free German fluently and can offer a variety of accents and dialects.

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