Frederick Busch

A Memory of War

A multilayered love story that affirms Frederick Busch's reputation as a writer of "sublimely dark work of almost unbearable beauty" (Wall Street Journal).

Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan's Upper West Side, turning a blind eye to the past of his Polish émigré parents. Then a new patient declares that he is the doctor's half-brother, the product of a union between Lescziak's Jewish mother and a German prisoner of war. The confrontation jolts Lescziak out of his complacency: suddenly, his failing marriage, his wife's infatuation with his best friend, and the disappearance of his young lover and suicidal patient, Nella, close in on him. Lescziak escapes into the recesses of his imagination, where his mother's affair with the German prisoner comes to life in precise, gorgeous detail. The novel unfolds into a romance set in England's Lake District in wartime, as Busch shows how our past presses on the present.

"A masterful storyteller."—The New York Times Book Review

"Frederick Busch is, surely, America's most courageous and most focused of writers. Intelligent, compassionate, and unflinchingly adult, his new novel, A Memory of War, is an outstanding audit of the emotional legacies that haunt and disfigure contemporary American life. Rarely has a writer put such muscular, rigorous prose to such tender use." —Jim Crace

"Frederick Busch moves deftly past the smoke and mirrors of wartime memory and troubled peacetime reconstructions to reveal a heartbreaking spiral of love and betrayal in two generations, one European, the other American. The writing here is beautiful, sometimes wickedly funny. Vivid as the characters of this novel are, it is history itself that is the captivating protagonist." —Patricia Hampl

"I am, once again, delighted and amazed and, frankly, in awe of what Frederick Busch can do with the novel as an art form. A Memory of War is a brilliant and complex meditation on something that defies abstraction. It's too easy to say 'memory' or 'imagination' or 'guilt' or 'love.' It's about all those things, but it's about much more. Perhaps the unnamable essence of existence. And, not incidentally, the novel is also an intensely compelling story. A Memory of War is a transcendently great book." —Robert Olen Butler