Crooked Maid - Softcover

Vyleta, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1443407747 ISBN 13: 9781443407748

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize and a Globe & Mail 100 Selection

From the writer praised as a cross between Hitchcock and Dostoyevsky, a dark and suspenseful novel set in post-war Vienna among the spectators in a criminal trial

Mid-summer, 1948. Two strangers, Anna Beer and young Robert Seidel, meet on a train as they return to Vienna, where life is just resuming after the upheavals of war. Men who were conscripted into the German army are filtering back home, including Anna’s estranged husband, Dr. Anton Beer, who was held prisoner in a brutal Russian camp. But when Anna returns to their old apartment, she finds another man living there and her husband missing.

At his own house, Robert is greeted by a young maid with a deformed spine. The household is in disarray, with his mother addicted to narcotics and his stepfather, an industrialist and former Party member, hospitalized after a mysterious attack.

Determined to rebuild their lives, Anna and Robert each begin a dogged search for answers in a world where repression is the order of the day. Before long, they are reunited as spectators at a criminal trial set to deliver judgment on Austria’s Nazi crimes.

In The Crooked Maid, Dan Vyleta conjures up a city haunted by its sins and a people caught between the needs of the present and debts owed to the past.

About this title

About the Author

Giller Prize–shortlisted and globally acclaimed author Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. Though he now calls Canada his home, he lives and teaches in the UK. His debut novel, Pavel & I, was published in thirteen countries and translated into eight languages. His second novel, The Quiet Twin, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His most recent novel, The Crooked Maid, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a Globe and Mail Book of the Year. Visit him online at danvyleta.com and on Twitter @danvyleta.

From Booklist

Novels about post-WWII Europe offer fascinating possibilities. Political lines are being redrawn, societies are rebuilding from the rubble, and chickens are coming home to roost. The Crooked Maid focuses on a group of characters converging on Vienna after a long absence. Anton Beer is headed home after years in a Russian POW camp. His estranged wife, Anna, is coming from Paris to meet him. The young man Robert, who shares Anna’s train, is coming home after his stepfather has fallen—or been pushed—from a high window. These and many other characters are drawn together at the trial of Robert’s stepbrother, accused of pushing his father, and by the search for Anton, who has gone missing. The novel has some trappings of a murder mystery but is more of a psychological novel, as the characters—from the eponymous crippled maid to the war-enriched matriarch—try to ferret out the truth from others while guarding their own secrets. This novel conjures up the stifling atmosphere of shame and deception of the postwar period and hints at escape through Vienna’s own “talking cure”—openness and honesty. --Lynn Weber

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1443407747
• ISBN 13: 9781443407748
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 440