The Scrapbook

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

Set in the 1990s when Anna, an innocent Harvard senior, falls hard for Christoph, a beautiful German exchange student, the novel explores a lifechanging seduction, and how the traumas of the past, particularly the aftershocks of fascism, echo and reverberate through the present. 

Along with Anna’s perspective, as she travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, key chapters follow both of their grandfathers during the war, as Clark skillfully evokes their contrasting experiences, whose implications bear on the present story. She writes with beautiful restraint and withheld fury at Anna’s grandfather’s witnessing of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation, and the atmosphere at Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, where the GIs carved their names in the mantelpiece and took photographs. The novel explores how these contexts haunt both Anna and her lover—and may be what will tear them apart.

Not a “WWII novel” in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies, and pierced by historical conscience. View Less