The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

February 1, 2019
When Tom Hope, a practical sheep farmer in 1960s Australia, married Hannah Babel, a twice-widowed Auschwitz survivor many years his senior, not everyone thought it was a good idea.But then again, Tom was easily swayed by women. His first wife, Trudy, had left him. Twice. The first time, she returned pregnant with another man's child. The second time, she joined a Christian commune, saddling Tom with raising her son, Peter. Tom and Peter became an amicable pair, herding sheep, pruning trees, and fixing engines together. So when Trudy returned two years later to claim Peter, it nearly broke both Tom, who refused to live alone again, and Peter, who had no love for this mother he didn't know, much less the Jesus Camp. Luckily, for Tom, Hannah comes to town, eager to open a bookstore. She hires Tom to help renovate the old shop building, and the two quickly become lovers. Although Hannah has survived the Holocaust, the memories of those she lost, including her son, Michael, haunt her. Meanwhile, unluckily for Peter, the pastor in charge of Jesus Camp is a controlling patriarch who believes heartily in thrashing the spirit of God into misbehaving boys, especially those who run away, like Peter. And although Tom would gladly fight to keep Peter, both the law and Hannah are against him, for Peter isn't Tom's biological son, and Hannah can't bear to love a boy again, a boy who could be lost just as Michael was. Can Tom and Hannah find a way to bring Peter home? Hillman (The Boy in the Green Suit, 2008, etc.) crafts a compelling tale, toggling among Tom's, Hannah's, and Peter's perspectives, as he delineates the stripping of each heart and draws together the ties that bind them together again.A heart-wrenching tale of love enduring all things in the face of evil.

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February 25, 2019
Hillman (The Boy in the Green Suit) offers an uplifting exploration of how people rise above tragedy to find joy. It’s 1968 in an Australian backwater town, and Tom Hope’s wife, Trudy, has disappeared, only to return a year later, pregnant with another man’s child. Tom grows to love the boy, Peter, but then Trudy abandons both when Peter is almost three, returning two years later to take her son from Tom and, shortly thereafter, send him divorce papers. After Hannah Babel—who survived Auschwitz but lost her entire family, including her husband and young son, to the concentration camps—comes to town, she hires Tom to fix up the bookstore she’s set on running, and the two of them—he, a calm workman, she an older, feisty intellectual—each with their separate anguish, find common ground and marry. Then Peter, still a child, reappears in Tom’s life, forcing Hannah to question whether she could allow herself to love another child, and Tom to potentially have to choose between his marriage and his love for the boy he considers a son. Hillman’s novel is an impressive, riveting tale of how two disparate and well-drawn people recover from soul-wrenching grief and allow themselves to truly love again. Agent: David Forrer, InkWell Management.

Starred review from February 15, 2019
When Tom Hope's wife, Trudy, returns to their remote farm after several mysterious weeks away, she's pregnant with another man's child. Generous soul that he is, Tom comes to love Peter as if he were his own, which makes Trudy's next and final departure to a religious commune with Peter in tow unbearable. Tom is just making his peace with his abandonment when along comes Hannah Babel, a colorful, charismatic woman several years Tom's senior, who opens a bookshop in their quaint little town and hires Tom to refurbish the shop. Their attraction is mutual and physical and astonishing to those who have witnessed Tom's pain. What the unassuming but often skeptical citizens of this backwater Australian town in the mid-1960s don't realize about Hannah, however, is that she carries scars of her own as a Holocaust survivor who lost her husband and son to the horrors of Auschwitz. Tom and Hannah's marriage brings the solace both were seeking, until eight-year-old Peter escapes from the commune bearing the physical and emotional consequences of the cult leader's torturous punishment. The openness of the Australian countryside is an apt setting for a complex exploration of grief, faith, and restoration, and in poignant, meditative, and stirring prose Hillman tells a heartrending and heartwarming tale of love and sacrifice.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2018

Winner of Australia's National Biography Award in 2005 for his memoir, The Boy in the Green Suit, and coauthor of 2013's folkloric The Honey Thief, Hillman offers a book-about-books novel featuring lonely Australian farmer Tom Hope, abandoned by a cheating wife, who starts to sparkle again when ebullient Hannah Babel arrives from Hungary in 1968 with plans to open little Hometown's first bookshop. But Hannah carries a burden from the past; she was an inmate at Auschwitz. Interest is building. Kelly, Martha Hall. Lost Roses. Ballantine. Apr. 2019. 448p. ISBN 9781524796372. $28; ebk.

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