Devastation Road

May 1, 2017
Hewitt’s profoundly moving thriller, his second novel after 2015’s The Dynamite Room, charts the harrowing journey of Owen, a British flight engineer suffering from amnesia, across war-torn Europe during the last days of WWII. Owen must somehow get from rural Czechoslovakia back home to England, all the while trying to remember exactly who he is. As he slowly pieces together the disjointed memories of his past, Czech teenager Janek Sokol and a Polish woman with a newborn baby join him in attempting to maneuver through a nightmarish landscape of mass death and destruction. Comparable to Kosinki’s The Painted Bird in both theme and gruesome imagery, Hewitt’s travelogue fluctuates between clarity and confusion, keeping the reader in a continual state of uncertainty. Sublime imagery (“Thin-framed dragonflies motored about like silent biplanes”) is a plus. Readers will undoubtedly feel a sense of overwhelming sorrow by the end. But that very well may be the point. Agent: Will Francis, Janklow & Nesbit.

May 1, 2017
One man's splintered consciousness symbolizes the fracture and confusion spanning Europe after World War II.In a ravaged landscape strewn with wreckage and bodies, where order has broken down and the population is in flux, a man named Owen Thomas wakes up in a field, in pain, wearing ill-fitting clothes and possessed of mere crumbs of memory. This nightmarish, otherworldly scenario comes slowly into focus as taking place in Czechoslovakia midway through 1945. Owen, concussed and bewildered, finds a companion in the form of Janek, a Czech teenager who's on a mission to find his brother, Petr, a resistance leader. The two start walking together, glimpsing terrors as they proceed, grabbing food and shelter where they can. Encountering other refugees, including Irena, a desperate Polish Jew with a baby, they become part of a human wave moving west, trying to stay ahead of the Russians. Owen has elusive flashbacks to his past in Britain, which sometimes include his brother, Max, or Max's girlfriend, Connie, or a working life, and slowly the pieces join together, exposing some shameful truths. Irena is searching for the man who raped her so she can give him back her unwanted child. This small band of survivors, connected by quests, falsehoods, and betrayals, is emblematic of tens of thousands of damaged, displaced persons depicted by British writer Hewitt (The Dynamite Room, 2015) in a vista of camps and clotted highways familiar from period newsreels. The book's most intriguing aspect is the intricate looping of Owen's memories, which contribute a fever-dream thread of discovery to an otherwise somewhat formless structure. There's a world of suffering in this story, sincerely portrayed, yet strangely short on warmth. As in his debut, Hewitt delivers an intriguingly structured sidebar to World War II, but this time the technique holds greater fascination than the characters.

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June 1, 2017
In his adventurously constructed and often-moving second novel, Hewitt (The Dynamite Room, 2015) visits the closing weeks of WWII in the company of a soldier whose memory loss echoes and amplifies the chaotic situation in which he finds himself. British soldier Owen comes to consciousness on the shore of a river in which he sees bodies, and pieces of bodies, floating by. Eventually, he realizes that he is somewhere in Czechoslovakia, and he attempts to make his way west with a young mother and a teenage would-be Czech rebel. The author believably renders the fragmented landscape and damaged people among whom Owen finds himself and parcels out his recovered memories gradually, allowing a picture of his past, and a new understanding of his present, to emerge. Although the last few chapters are somewhat plot-heavy, Hewitt's portrait of postwar Europe and its newly repurposed concentration camps is vivid, and his narrative technique provides a fresh way of viewing a familiar subject.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2017

As World War II winds down, a man wakes up on a battlefield with no memory of who he is and begins the long, arduous walk across shattered Germany toward England, which he barely remembers as home. Long-listed for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction; Hewitt debuted with The Dynamite Room, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick.

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