ISBN 9780956614407
Published by Pilrig Press, 2010
It is 1932, Silesia, Germany, and the eve of Antonia’s 12th birthday. Hitler’s Brownshirts and Red Front Marxists are fighting each other in the streets. Antonia doesn’t care about the political unrest but it’s all her family argue about. Then Hitler is made Chancellor and order is restored across the country, but not in Antonia’s family. The longer the National Socialists stay in power, the more divided the family becomes with devastating consequences. Unpleasant truths are revealed and terrible lies uncovered. Antonia thinks life can’t get much worse – and then it does. Partly based on a truelife story, Antonia’s gripping diary takes the reader inside the head of an ordinary teenage girl growing up. Her journey into adulthood, however, is anything but ordinary.
Review
“We think by now that there can be no more untold stories from the 1930s and the Second World War. Then a book like this comes along and we are once again astonished by the capacity of some humans to do unspeakably cruel things, and of others to survive them. The simple, almost mundane tone of Antonia’s diary makes The Blue Suitcase all the more shocking. It’s hard to read, but harder to stop.” James Robertson
 | Marianne WheelaghanI grew up in the 60s, one of nine children and of dual Scottish-German heritage. We were relatively poor and didn’t do holidays as such. Possibly because of this, and possibly to get some piece and quiet from my larger-than-life siblings, I used to spend a lot of time hiding in quiet corners and making up stories in my head set in faraway places. This is probably when my love of storytelling began. I also spent a lot of time wondering who I was, more Scottish than German or visa versa. This may be why I like to explore themes in my writing to do with ‘home’ and ‘place’ as well as ‘identity’. My first novel, The Blue Suitcase (ISBN 9780956614407) is a refugee fiction, set in Silesia, Germany in the 1930/40s and based on my mother’s true life story. It tells the harrowing and much under-told story of the second world war from the perspective of an ordinary German Christian girl who becomes displaced. The crime novels, Food of Ghosts ( 978-0-9566144-3-8) and The Shoeshine Killer (978-0-9927234-3-9), are set in the lesser developed countries of Kiribati and Fiji. Through the telling of conventional crime stories in unconventional settings, I hope to bring these faraway places and people to life and show that beneath very different surfaces we all share similar wants and desires. |
