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by Alice Austen
An outstanding debut novel—a love story, mystery, and philosophical puzzle, told in the singular voices of the residents of a Beaux Arts apartment house in Belgium during World War II.
On the eve of the Nazi occupation, in the heart of Brussels, life for the residents of eight apartments at 33 Place Brugmann is about to change forever.
Charlotte Sauvin, an art student raised by her beloved architect father in apartment 4L, knows all the details of the building and its people: how light falls on gleaming wood and voices echo off marble, the distinct knock of her dear friend, Julian Raphaël, the eldest son of the art dealer's family across the hall. Then the Raphaëls disappear, leaving behind everything but their invaluable art collection, which mysteriously vanishes.
All that's familiar fractures when whispers of German occupation become reality. A Nazi functionary moves into the building, and the residents' lives become increasingly entwined. Charlotte's godmother Masha, a beautiful seamstress upstairs, deepens her dangerous affair with a wartime compatriot of Colonel Warlemont in 3L—a man far more calculating than his neighbors believe. As relationships shift and new alliances form, the question of who to trust becomes a matter of life and death.
In the face of their perilous new reality, every member of this accidental community will discover they are not the person they believed themself to be. When confronted with a cruel choice—submit to the regime or risk their lives to save one another—each learns the truth about what, and who, matters to them the most.
A propulsive and hopeful tour de force, 33 Place Brugmann champions the restorative power of love, courage, and art in times of great threat.
"33 Place Brugmann is an achingly suspenseful historical novel, sad at moments, but always intriguing, with a complex cast of vivid and involving characters. Wonderful reading." —Scott Turow, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Presumed Innocent
"33 Place Brugmann is a riveting portrait of community during a time when the very notion of community was under siege. A master of time and place, Austen has a historian's grasp of detail and a storyteller's command of suspense. This is a beautiful and important novel." —Jessica Shattuck, New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle and Last House
This information about 33 Place Brugmann was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alice Austen won the John Cassavetes Award for her debut film Give Me Liberty (writer/producer). She is a past resident of the Royal Court Theatre and her internationally produced plays include Animal Farm (Steppenwolf Theatre), Water, Cherry Orchard Massacre (Vestnik Evropy), and Girls in the Boat (Dramatic Publishing). She studied creative writing under Seamus Heaney at Harvard, where she received her JD, after which she moved to Brussels and lived on Place Brugmann. Austen currently lives in Milwaukee and is working on a new film and her next novel.
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