A brother's blood : a novel
Record details
- ISBN: 9780060186678
- ISBN: 0060186674
-
Physical Description:
323 pages ; 22 cm
print - Edition: 1st ed.
- Publisher: New York : HarperCollins Publishers, ©1996.
Content descriptions
Summary, etc.: | Decades after the end of World War II, Wolfgang Kallick arrives in America to learn the details of his brother Dieter's death as a prisoner of war in the state of Maine. |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Brothers Maine Fiction Germany Fiction Brothers Fiction Germans Maine Fiction Prisoners of war Fiction World War, 1939-1945 Fiction |
Genre: | War stories. Mystery fiction. War stories. Detective and mystery stories. |
Available copies
- 7 of 7 copies available at Bibliomation.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 7 total copies.
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Burroughs-Saden Main - Bridgeport | X FIC WHITE (Text) | 34000074303389 | Closed Stacks Adult Fiction | Available | - |
Killingly Library | F WHI (Text) | 34040073829166 | Adult Mystery | Available | - |
Oliver Wolcott Library - Litchfield | FIC WHITE, M (Text) | 36123001037314 | Adult Fiction | Available | - |
Silas Bronson Library - Waterbury | MYS FIC WHITE, M (Text) | 34005073600289 | Adult Mystery | Available | - |
Somers Public Library | MYS/FIC WHI (Text) | 34042073085153 | Adult Fiction | Available | - |
Tolland Public Library | F WHI (Text) | 34051074091029 | Adult Fiction | Available | - |
Willimantic Public Library | F WHITE (Text) | 34036127047441 | Adult Fiction | Available | - |
BookList Review
A Brother's Blood
Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Few Americans know that nearly 400,000 German prisoners of war were detained in American POW camps during World War II. But Libby Pelletier knows. She, her father, and her brother worked in such a camp. Decades later, Libby, a confirmed old maid who runs a roadside cafe in rural Maine, finally manages to bring her brother Leon, a recovering alcoholic, home from the VA hospital. But shortly thereafter, Leon receives a mysterious phone call and, hours later, is found dead. Libby is convinced Leon was killed, but she can't prove it. Then a German named Wolfgang Kallick turns up, asking questions about the disappearance of his brother from the POW camp years earlier. When Libby tries to help him, she gets threatening phone calls, but she persists and finally uncovers a tragic secret. White's debut is both a subtle and cunning morality tale and a powerful character study. In brilliantly understated prose, White captures perfectly the insularity and claustrophobia of a small New England town, the gruff eccentricity of its inhabitants, the brusque pride of a lonely spinster, and the moral tragedy of war. This dazzling first novel deserves a place in all collections. --Emily Melton
Publishers Weekly Review
A Brother's Blood
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Remarkably controlled for a first novel, this literary thriller from a Pushcart nominee for short fiction tells of a malignant secret that comes back to haunt the denizens of a backwoods Maine logging community that was once the site of a WWII labor camp for German POWs. In her never-ending struggle to nurse her alcoholic brother Leon back to sobriety, narrator Libby Pelletier, the 61-year-old proprietor of a local country store and cafe, brings him home from the VA hospital in Augusta. Coincidental to Leon's homecoming, Libby, whose deceased father once ran the local logging operation for a giant paper company, is visited by a German on a pilgrimage to clarify the puzzling circumstances of his brother's death following his escape from the POW camp in March 1945. At the time, both Libby and her brother were teenagers working with her father's crew. After Libby receives foreboding phone calls from an anonymous man asking to speak to her brother, Leon is found dead; shortly thereafter, Libby is warned against making further inquiries into the young POW's death. Tension increases and the mystery deepens as the determined Libby, thwarted by coverups and menaced by insidious forces, stumbles down one blind alley after another as she searches for the truth behind the two deaths. Shuttling deftly between past and present, driven by undercurrents of latent energy, this novel marks White as a talented and energetic writer. U.K, translation rights: Sobel, Weber. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A Brother's Blood
Kirkus Reviews
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
An earnest first novel from anthologist/storyteller White (American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Stories by Emerging Writers, Vols. I-IV) that's rooted firmly in the frontier between mystery and mainstream fiction. Desert Storm is in the headlines when Wolfgang Kallick comes from Erfurt to Moosehead Lake, Maine, to find out what happened to his brother Dieter in that other war 45 years ago. The official story is that Dieter, a POW who'd been shipped to the Sheshuncook logging camp, drowned following an escape attempt two months before V-E Day. But Wolfgang has heard rumors that his brother's body had unexplained head wounds, and now he wants to put the case to rest. In upstate Maine, whose denizens hardly talk to neighbors they've known for years, everyone gives Wolfgang the cold shoulder--even old Libby Pelletier, the Country Kitchen owner who'd be more sympathetic if she weren't preoccupied with problems of her own. Libby's been the matriarch of her family since her mother ran off back in 1943, leaving behind her brusquely unsympathetic husband Ambroise and two scared teenagers, Libby and her kid brother Leon. Now Leon, exhausted from his latest bout of d.t.'s, is home from the hospital, and Libby has her hands full, especially when he tells her not to have anything to do with the Kraut. Shortly after, though, Leon himself is found frozen to death, and Libby, frazzled by the obligatory threatening phone calls, the attack on her dog, and the repeated flashbacks to 1945 that engulf her, finally agrees to talk to Wolfgang Kallick--only to find him too another accident victim soon after. With her own brother's blood as well as Wolfgang's crying out for revenge, Libby goes on the offensive, though the revelation she flushes out will surprise only newcomers to the Buried Secret subgenre. The mystery plot is tired and slack, but White's lovely way with Libby's cracked voice may well win his share of crossover readers.