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A Stone for Bread

In 1963, North Carolina poet Henry Beam published a collection of poems, claiming they had been saved from a Nazi death camp. The authorship controversy that followed cost Henry his university teaching position and forced him into decades of silence. Thirty-four years after the poems’ publication, Henry breaks that silence and begins telling grad student Rachel Singer about his year in Paris, how the naïve young American became entangled with fiery right-wing politician Renard Marcotte, his love affair with the shop girl Eugenié and his unnerving encounter with the enigmatic René, the man who purportedly gave Henry the disputed poems. The novel moves back and forth in time from 1997 North Carolina to post-World War I France, to Paris in the mid-‘50s and into the horror of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Even as Rachel wonders how much is true, Henry’s story forces her to examine her own life and the secret she has never acknowledged.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 310
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781604891560
  • Release date
  • 2015