The Scrapbook - by Heather Clark (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Set in the 1990s when Anna, an innocent Harvard senior, falls hard for Christoph, a beautiful German exchange student, [this] novel explores a life-changing 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 ... evokes their contrasting experiences, whose implications bear on the present story"--

Book Synopsis

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

"An ambitious, stirring debut." --People

"An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love." --Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots

The traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism echo and reverberate through the present in this story of a lifechanging seduction.

Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation's recent history and the war's destruction. Christoph condemns his country's actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen.

As Anna travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, her perspective is powerfully interrupted by chapters that follow both of their grandfathers during the war. One witnesses the plight of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation and helps capture Hitler's Eagle's Nest, while the other fights for Nazi Germany. Their fragmented stories haunt Anna and her lover two generations later--and may still tear them apart.

Not a "World War Two novel" in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming tale of first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies and historical conscience.

Review Quotes

One of The Millions' Most Anticipated 2025 Books
One of the Los Angeles Times' 30 Must-Read Books for Summer
One of the Boston Globe's Best Summer 2025 Books
One of People's Best Books of June 2025
One of Foreign Policy's "Novels We're Reading in June"
One of The Herald's Best New Books to Read
One of Zibby Owens' Summer Reads Pick
One of BookPage's Top Ten July Reads
One of Shelf Awareness's Best Books of the Week

"An ambitious, stirring debut." --People

"Clark grapples with history, latching onto inspiration from her grandfather's World War II scrapbook. This intense story explores first love between American and German university students who must uncover and reconcile the past to forge a future" --Boston Globe

"Clark uses her first novel to explore a highly literary and highly troubled relationship. [The Scrapbook] is at once a rich historical novel and a philosophical study of how much influence past generations have on our affections." --Los Angeles Times

"Immersive. . . Clark is interrogating whether past misdeeds implicate future generations--and whether they should." --The Washington Post

"Heather Clark writes with a rare empathy. . . . In her elegant, calmly unsettling debut novel, Clark illustrates how the cold shadow of German history bleeds constantly into the present, even in the most intimate spheres. . . . The Scrapbook is ostensibly a love story, or, rather, a story of transatlantic obsession. It is also an ethical meditation on memory, complicity and the psychological tremors that can affect our lives decades after the events that prompted them--events that we might not even have been alive to experience." --Times Literary Supplement

"Phenomenal. . . a unique blend of literary and historical fiction as well as a penetrating exploration of philosophy, art, historical responsibility and guilt in the context of war. . . . The Scrapbook is worthy of reading and rereading as Clark serves up romance, history and political philosophy in ways that could hardly be more relevant." --BookPage (starred review)

"What a novel. . . . Clark has achieved an impressive feat in this beautiful and powerful novel examining the nature of intergenerational trauma, inherited guilt and all-consuming love." --The Jewish Chronicle

"Clark, in prose at the same time richly philosophical and light of touch, accomplishes a double feat. She has written both an aching love story and an incisive examination of the politics of memory." --Literary Review

"Finely wrought. . . . The Scrapbook is a fascinating tangle of yearning, history, and legacy." --Shelf Awareness

"The Scrapbook is an incredibly smart novel, with an intricate and perfectly paced depiction of a delicate and intense relationship. It's as if a Sally Rooney novel merged with Richard Linklater's film, Before Sunrise, with forays into history and humanity further deepening the experience." --BookList

"The Scrap­book crack­les with the inten­si­ty of meet­ing one's intel­lec­tu­al match -- the debates, the dis­cov­ery, and, of course, the books. . . . Sen­tence by sen­tence, Clark builds Anna and Cristoph's dynam­ic -- sexy, slight­ly masochis­tic, and always propul­sive. Her reserved, ele­gant prose nails the rend­ing, intox­i­cat­ing nau­sea of first love with­out being cloy­ing. To fall in love is to shift from youth­ful naïveté toward adulthood's cloudi­er com­pli­ca­tions. Clark treats this rite as a cere­bral expe­ri­ence as much as it is phys­i­cal." --Jewish Book Council

"[The Scrapbook] offer[s] a flying tour of literary representations of the Holocaust and its legacy--a lightly annotated reading list that includes fiction writers such as Tadeusz Borowski and W. G. Sebald--as well as a meditation on the cost of political crimes to a nation's trustworthiness and honor, even generations later." --New York Times

"The Scrapbook weaves a fictional tale of first love, family, and historical memory from a real-life World War II scrapbook." --Foreign Policy

"Clark's first novel combines historical fiction with a thoughtful examination of a classic rite of passage for many young adults: falling in unrequited love. . . . Clark deftly interweaves Anna and Christoph's interactions with glimpses of their grandfathers' lives during the war, adding depth to the story. . . . Clark is at her best." --Library Journal

"Heather Clark's [The Scrapbook] is gripping from the start, written with confident concision and directness." --The Herald (Scotland)

"The Pulitzer finalist enthralls in The Scrapbook, her passionate and perceptive first novel." --Publishers Weekly (cover and starred review)

"Heather Clark's The Scrapbook is a masterpiece. This beautifully crafted, quietly devastating love story reminds us of the epic impact of the Second World War across continents and through generations, its scars perhaps most poignantly felt in the intimate interactions between two solitary people." --Rebecca Donner, New York Times bestselling author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

"Through an exquisitely observed love affair, Clark explores how the Nazis' lingering legacy can still haunt the lives of those born long after the war. A stunningly good novel." --Julia Boyd, Sunday Times bestselling author of A Village in the Third Reich

"Ingeborg Bachmann once asked, 'When will the war be over?' The Scrapbook offers an answer to this timeless question in a work of searing tenderness. An intimate portrait of youthful romance, it meticulously captures the melancholy inheritance of a generation trying to find their place amidst the rubble of the past. Clark reminds us that we're never as far from history as we'd like to imagine and just how much we must give up in order to move on. A stunning quiet work you won't be able to put down." --Samantha Rose Hill, author of Hannah Arendt and What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt

"Historical fiction strikes a complicated balance, between a need to recreate with some accuracy events in the past while at the same time communicating the relevance of those facts to the present. Heather Clark situates a contemporary love story in the shadow of--and with capacious insight into--German history both during and immediately after the Second World War. Clark navigates difficult conceptual ground with remarkable ease, making the complex legacy of the war appreciable to readers in the present." --Matthew Longo, author of The Picnic

"An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love. With a biographer's eye for detail and a novelist's grasp of human frailty, The Scrapbook traces the fault lines between past and present, between nations and individuals, revealing how history lingers--not in grand narratives, but in intimate entanglements." --Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots

"A swiftly-moving, molecularly perceptive, singular portrait of intoxicating young love. Clark captures the psychological nuances and emotional currents of two youthful intellects wrestling with the weight of history and questions of legacy, moral responsibility, and the blinders and dissonance of a complicated romance." --Aube Rey Lescure, author of River East, River West

About the Author

HEATHER CLARK is the author of Red Comet The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, one of the New York Times's Ten Best Books of 2021, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a "Book of the Year" in The Guardian, The Times, The Boston Globe, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NYPL Cullman Center Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, an NEH Public Scholars Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship. Clark's work has appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Review, Poetry, Time, Air Mail, Literary Hub, PN Review, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in English literature from Oxford University and lives outside New York City.