Promises to Keep

December 15, 2012
Long after a diverse group of families have created a good life in the wake of the horrors of World War II, the past comes back to haunt one of them. The Dower House is home to nine families, beginning with famous sculptor Felix Breit and his wife, Angela, both concentration camp survivors. Most of the community members are engaged in the arts. Their numbers include several architects, an editor, a writer, a BBC executive and the families' children, collectively known as The Tribe. In 1956, Britain finds itself in a transformative period. So do the Dower House families, who have big plans to buy the estate, owned by a gravel company, create permanent apartments they would own, build several new apartments and eventually establish a golf course. The golf course plans are well in hand by 1963, when Angela goes out to offer a surveying crew some coffee and turns her life upside down. A member of the crew known as Inge Dobson is really SS-Aufseherin Irmgard Heugel, who made Angela's life a living hell in Ravensbruck, where she was a political prisoner. When Inge, whose husband is headmaster at the children's school, comes back later to talk privately, Angela must decide whether she will ignore the past or confront it. The last in the Dowager House trilogy (Strange Music, 2012, etc.) deftly concludes its often heartbreaking story of love, ambition and redemption.

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November 15, 2012
The Dower House (2011), the first novel in Macdonald's England-set series about German Holocaust survivor Felix Breit, was followed by Strange Music (2012). Now the third book in the literary sandwich begins in 1956, during the Suez crisis, and moves into the 1960s, a time of dizzying change. The community of nine growing familiestheir Tribe of children now numbers 30are bickering over the division of space in light of new housing developments and decide to buy Dower House. When one of Felix' long-lost cousins surfaces in London, now very British and a member of the Church of England, Felix and his wife, Angela, must face both painful truths about the past and an uncertain future. They feel marooned in the heart of this manicured belt of green and miss the natural wildness of the acreage as it was when they first took refuge there. A poignant tale of the personal and the political, with a large and compelling cast of characters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)