The Scrapbook - by Heather Clark (Hardcover)

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 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
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"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

"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.