The German Woman

July 27, 2009
For a novel with two main characters, logic dictates that each performer should take one of the leading roles to create a mini-cast production, but this audio proceeds the old-fashioned way, in tag-team style. Anne Flosnik, performing the first section set primarily in Germany after the Great War, has a brittle voice that takes some getting used to. Her range is dwarfed by the talented Michael Page, who picks up the story in London in 1944. Though narrating in a slightly British accent, Page captures the American cadences and personality of Charles/Claus with all his yearnings and ambivalence, and his Kate, the British-born woman at the heart of the first section, outshines Flosnik's interpretation. Despite the unevenness of the performances, Page's galvanizing narrative makes this well-researched historical novel worth sticking with. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover
(Reviews, Apr. 27
).

April 27, 2009
Griner's second novel (after Collectors
) is a gritty, unsentimental story of love and loyalty played out across Europe during the two World Wars. It begins with Kate Zweig, a nurse, working at a crumbling field hospital in Prussia with her doctor husband. Shortly, their hospital is destroyed by Russian soldiers during WWI, and after the pair are captured and tortured, a sympathetic Russian officer arranges for their covert escape into Germany. Jump to WWII London, where Claus, aka “Charles Murphy,” an American filmmaker of Irish and German lineage, serves as a neighborhood warden while ostensibly working for the British Ministry of Information. In truth, he has been recruited as a spy for Britain. Or has he? Claus meets Kate in Hyde Park, and thereafter Griner knits together a multifarious plot that calls into question collaboration versus loyalty: to homeland, to humanity, to family and to lovers. Griner is unflinching in his depictions of battlefield atrocity (a conscious soldier with an exposed-brain injury appears on the first page), offering a sober grounding for the cerebral exploration of collaboration and betrayal. Fans of Graham Greene or Alan Furst will want to take a look.