These are the first books written by Nina Willner and Terry Hayes: Forty Autumns published in 2016 and I Am Pilgrim in 2012.
I Am Pilgrim can be disposed of quickly. It is a long (almost nine hundred pages) spy thriller in the same genre as David McCloskey’s debut novel, Damascus Station. Both are gripping page turners and both authors have gone on to write more. I might read McCloskey’s follow up, Moscow X, but will swerve The Year of the Locust. Why Terry’s publisher thought it was a good idea to publish the first two chapters of Locust at the end of Pilgrim I cannot imagine. It simply tells the reader that Locust is the same story as Pilgrim with different characters and locations. That’s what PG Wodehouse does best but it doesn’t work for a paperback thriller writer.
Forty Autumns may be the only book Nina Williams writes but it is enough to establish her reputation and will I hope be widely read today and by future generations. It is the story of her family from the end of WW II, when her great-grandparents and grandparents are “liberated’ by the Russians, until 2013. She portrays her family’s life in East Germany, interspersing it with a wider picture of conditions in East Germany and eventual re-unification. A further strand is the story of her mother who flees alone to the west aged twenty, a hair-raising tale deserving of a book of its own, and Nina’s own life that takes her back to Berlin as a US army intelligence officer in 1985.
Her description of the pain of reunification casts light on the fear and anxiety endured by older East Germans, taught of the evils of Capitalism and the moral degeneracy of the West. Adjustment was difficult and on a practical level the value of their savings and pensions was negligible. They became second class Germans and many thought they had been better off under oppression in the East. It was a new narrative to me.
Another author making her debut (this year) is Josie Ferguson. Her book, The Silence in Between, is in the same genre as Forty Autumns: an emotional historical novel of a family separated by the Berlin Wall. I will read it just as surely as I will not read Terry Hayes’s second thriller.