Product Description

Sol is a highly gifted six-year-old; his adoring mother believes he is destined for greatness. Yet he is also unsettling, chillingly un-childlike. He bears the same birthmark as his father, grandmother and great-grandmother had before him. When Sol and his family make an unexpected trip to Germany, terrible secrets start to emerge.Narrated by children in each generation of the family, "Fault Lines" traces their history back through the years, from California to New York, from Haifa to Toronto and Munich. As dormant family secrets are awakened, shock waves reverberate from a hidden past into a fragile present.Domestic in focus and epic in scope, "Fault Lines" is a vibrant, richly drawn and captivating piece of storytelling. It shows what can happen when past and present collide. Birthmarks are not all that can be passed down through a family line...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66280 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"'Nancy Huston is a brilliant, lyrical, unforgettable writer.' Janette Turner Hospital 'Explosive in its control and its ambition.' Le Figaro"

Canadian born Huston (Dolce Agonia, 2001, etc.) won the Prix Femina in France for this novel, which traces four generations of a family while examining how unshared secrets shape each succeeding/preceding generation.In California in 2004, six-year-old Sol, a brilliant, spoiled brat, attends a Protestant church as a compromise between his Catholic-born mother Tessa and Jewish-raised father Randall. After surgery more or less removes the birthmark Sol inherited from Randall, Sol's grandmother Sadie orchestrates a trip to Munich with the whole family, including Sol's German-born great-grandmother Erra. The trip is not a success. Flash back to 1982 when six-year-old Randall, also brilliant but more sweet-natured than Sol, basks in the love of his father, a Jewish playwright in his 40s, and desperately tries to please his 26-year-old mother Sadie, a tense perfectionist. Randall loves the year he lives with his parents in Israel while Sadie, a graduate student of the Holocaust and recent convert to Judaism, does research. Then public and personal disasters conflate: Shortly after a controversial Israeli-backed massacre in Lebanon, a car accident leaves Sadie permanently crippled. In 1962, lonely six-year-old Sadie must live with her stern Canadian grandparents while her bohemian unwed mother Kristina finds herself. Sadie, who considers the birthmark on her bottom "dirty," is overjoyed when Kristina, who has changed her name to Erra, marries the kindly Jewish manager of her burgeoning musical career and brings Sadie to live with them. Then a strange foreign man shows up and shatters Sadie's fragile security. In 1944, Kristina considers herself the adored youngest daughter of a solid German family until her older "brother" explains that, like him, she was stolen by the Nazis from her real parents, and the two forge a secret bond. After liberation, Kristina is adopted by Canadian parents. To keep her "brother" close, she names her birthmark after him.An elegant if overly manipulated structural design parallels the insightful but overly simplified psychological evolution of vulnerable children (excepting demon Sol) into reactive adults. (Kirkus Reviews)

Clare Drewett, South Wales Argus
The novel's form both creates and deconstructs its own ambiguities leading to a fascinating read. Domestic in focus and epic in scope, Fault Lines is a captivating piece of storytelling.

About the Author
Nancy Huston was born in Calgary in 1953 and studied in New England and New York. At the age of twenty, she moved to Paris where she lives to this day. A prolific writer in both French and English, she translates her work herself. Fault Lines is her eleventh novel. She is married to the historian and essayist Tzvetan Todorov and has two children.

Customer Reviews

Mixed bag of faults and strengths
Story of four generations of a family with a secret written through the narrative voice of each generation as a six year old. The secret turned out to be the 'legal' abduction of the main character by Nazis because of her blond features being a prototyype of Arian. Based on a true policy intitative known as the 'Fountain of Life' that affected some 250,000 children, the book covers a fascinating and little known abuse, but the plot fails to satisfy my curiousity or convince me. The first narrative - in the present day - is a peculiarly nasty and self-satisfied child and as the story unfolds we never find out why. It ends so abruptly I found myself looking to see if some pages had fallen out. The book's pitfalls are odd as it is clear the author has a real talent. It is as if the book was published before the writer had completed the novel.

However, I would recommend you read it yourself. It is interesting and I may have missed something obvious.