An afternoon with Heather Clark: The Scrapbook, talk and signing

Join us for a signing and chat with award winning author, Heather Clark. She’ll be discussing her new novel, The Scrapbook. A complex look at the aftershocks of WW2 that still affect relationships, families and our sense of self, even today. Based on the real life wartime scrapbook of Clark’s GI grandfather, The Scrapbook is a fascinating, personal novel about the traumas of the past and their impact on the present. Heather Clark will be interviewed by Julie Phillips.

About The Scrapbook:

From the award-winning author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, a stunning debut novel: the story of an intense first love haunted by history and family memory, inspired by the startling WWII scrapbook of Clark’s own grandfather, hidden in an attic until after his death.

The traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism echo and reverberate through the present in this story of a life changing seduction.

Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation’s recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen.

As Anna travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, her perspective is powerfully interrupted by chapters that follow both of their grandfathers during the war. One witnesses the plight of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation and helps capture Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, while the other fights for Nazi Germany. Their fragmented stories haunt Anna and her lover two generations later—and may still tear them apart.

Not a “World War Two novel” in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming tale of first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies and historical conscience.

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