This Strange Eventful History
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This Strange Eventful History
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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Campbell
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By:
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Claire Messud
About this listen
'[A] wise and insightful novel about identity and family' The Times, Book of the Day
'An epic family odyssey... Ambitious and compelling' Guardian, Book of the Day
'A rich, sprawling saga... This Strange Eventful History may be Messud's finest book' Sunday Telegraph
June 1940. As Paris falls to the Germans, Gaston Cassar - honorable servant of France, devoted husband and father, currently posted as naval attache in Salonica - bids farewell to his beloved wife, aunt and children, placing his faith in God that they will be reunited after the war. But escaping the violence of that cataclysm is not the same as emerging unscathed. The family will never again be whole.
A work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, This Strange Eventful History charts the Cassars' unfolding story as its members move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia and France - their itinerary shaped as much by a search for an elusive wholeness, as by the imperatives of politics, faith, family, industry and desire.©2024 Claire Messud (P)2024 Hachette Audio UK
Critic Reviews
'A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud's epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become "colonized" by family.' (Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winner of THE NETANYAHU’S)
'This Strange Eventful History is an astonishment - rich and luminous, dense with life, wide with wisdom. Messud's view of the Cassar family - and we suspect as we read it, her own - is as emotionally precise and imaginatively capacious as her rendering of the history that shapes their fortunes. Rarely has the private magic of familial love been so fully realized in a public act of literature. Just exquisite.' (Ayad Akhtar)
'One of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters . . . Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller.' (Yiyun Li)