Kirkus Reviews

Forthcoming in May 2024:

 

“This priceless recapturing of darkened history, this lifetime’s rumination on family, result in a stunningly intelligent and elegantly written work, whose honesty, maturity, perspective and wisdom are so rare in today’s memoirs. I found it utterly engrossing.”

 

— Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

"A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust and those survivors who started anew in America…a poignant memoir.”  — Kirkus Reviews

While Evelyn Toynton’s father became a civic-minded American, with a great sense of obligation to his suburban community, her uncle never stopped feeling like an exile in the US; as soon after World War II as he could, he started making trips back to Germany. The women in her family also had widely varying relationships to the societies in which they found refuge. One of them, after browbeating a Nazi police chief into arranging for her husband’s release from Dachau, wound up in England and became a passionate Anglophile; another, a widow deprived of all material comfort and security, retreated into seclusion in her tiny New York apartment, distancing herself from American life and finding solace in her beloved German poets. A fierce Zionist who smuggled guns and money from Europe into Palestine under the noses of the British went on to found a kibbutz and fight for the rights of Arabs as well as Jews. Then there was the author’s German-born mother, who emigrated to the U.S. only to be struck down by tragedy and forced to live separately from her children, but still found ways to nurture them and provide them with a haven from their own troubles. All of them had lost not only their homeland and their sense of identity but also many of the people they loved. Yet almost all found ways to give meaning to their lives, either in their own small circles or in the larger world.

A tale of romance and illusion–and what's left of love when they're stripped away. After the sudden death of her husband, a young American woman flees to England, the site of the nostalgic fantasies her father spun for her in her childhood before disappearing for good. Once there, she is drawn into the tangled lives of an aristocratic family whose secrets are gradually revealed to her, exposing the nightmare beneath the elegant façade.

 

"A wordsmith of the highest order, Toynton weaves a deeply cinematic story."
— Library Journal, starred review

 

"With rich literary allusions, Toynton delivers a classic story set in Thatcher’s England. Themes of parental legacy, lost innocence, the impermanence of life, DNA versus nurture, and illusion versus reality wrap vine-like around evocative locales and vivid characters."
— Booklist, starred review

 

A well-told and gripping drama"."
— Times Literary Supplement, UK

 

 "An intense and beautifully written novel, a vivid portrayal of romantic Anglophilia and disillusionment, explored in all its sorrowful and comic complexity."
— Joan Brady, Whitbread Award-winning author of Theory of War

"A scrupulously observed story of an American Anglophile confronted by the quirks, cruelties and delusions of the English upper classes – I was fascinated."
— Lynn Freed, author of The Last Laugh

"Evelyn Toynton’s riveting new novel, about an American in England who falls under the spell of an aristocratic family, artfully explores the damage done by ideals and illusions, while exposing the underlying reality no one wants to acknowledge."
— Carole Angier, biographer of Jean Rhys and Primo Levi

"Evelyn Toynton's latest novel is a pitch-perfect exploration of an aristocratic English family whose inheritance is both glorious and grim. With her superb eye for cultural and psychological details, Toynton pulls us easily into a world that is at once familiar and uncommon, dark, witty, and achingly human."
— Elizabeth Benedict, author of Almost

 

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“The Oriental Wife is a clear-eyed but tender, always intelligent and beautifully observed group portrait of German Jews, their lives shattered by the Third Reich, painfully finding their way in England and the New World. A remarkable and virtuous achievement!”

— Louis Begley, author of About Schmidt and Wartime Lies

 

“In this poignant, vivid, and richly humane novel, Evelyn Toynton measures the weight of personal tragedy against the great catastrophes of twentieth-century history.”

— Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation and Appassionata

 

“How much reality can you take? That’s a question I think you have to ask yourself before opening Evelyn Toynton’s fine, mordant new book…when Toynton describes love and love-making, the emotional high points seem to leap from the page….sentence by sentence, superior fiction. “

— Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered, NPR

 

“A first-rate literary work and a character study of loss.”

— Kirkus Reviews

 

“With delicacy and precision, Evelyn Toynton’s The Oriental Wife recounts the lives of a group of German Jews who have fled the Holocaust to settle in America …One of the strengths of this subtle and luminous novel is its compassionate but clear-eyed view of each of its characters.”

— The Washington Independent Review of Books

 

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