Magdeburg
4.5/5
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About this ebook
Sweeping in its scope and ambition, Heather Richardson’s debut novel tells the intertwining and conflicting stories of the Henning family, their friends, their associates and their enemies.
Whilst the family printing business is prospering, Christa Henning is troubled. Her brother Dieter is more restless than usual, and her friend Gertrude has been rushed into a loveless marriage. She also has the care of her strange little sister, Elsbeth.
As the endless war of religion tightens its grip remorselessly around the city, old loyalties and old certainties are placed into question and, following the sacking of the town, Christa finds her life shattered beyond recognition. From the chaos and deadly enmity of sectarian strife, she slowly rebuilds a life in the city she loves.
Vibrantly and convincingly told, Magdeburg is a gripping historical novel, striking in its contemporary resonances and its ability to portray complex truths about belief, family, belonging and war.
“An accomplished debut” – Historical Novels Review
Heather Richardson
Heather Richardson was born in Northern Ireland in 1964 and lives in Belfast. After a degree in English Literature at the University of Leicester she had a predictably non-literary series of jobs, including bus driver, medical representative and company director. A career break for child-rearing gave her an excuse to pursue a new path as a writer and lecturer. She has an MA and PhD in Creative Writing, and now works for the Open University as a lecturer in English and Creative Writing. Her short stories, poems and creative non-fiction have been published in journals and anthologies in the UK, Ireland and Australia. Her first novel, Magdeburg (Lagan Press, 2010), is set in Germany during the Thirty Years War. Vagabond Voices published her second novel, Doubting Thomas, in 2017.
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Reviews for Magdeburg
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5To far too many English readers, the Thirty Years’ War is a hazy shadow in the middle distance of history. We are aware of its presence but it has no direct significance or importance. And yet it shaped the balance of power in Europe for the following three hundred years, and was as critical a juncture for the continent as the Napoleonic Wars or the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain. It is against this momentous backdrop that Heather Richardson sets her novel. The book opens as Magdeburg, proud bastion of Lutheran faith, is under siege by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor. Richardson draws a painstaking portrait of the domestic, commercial and spiritual life of a prosperous merchant city; of the cheerful hand-to-mouth existence of the soldier and the mercenary; of the claustrophobia of the era; of the fragility of life. It is an intimate pen-and-ink portrait on a human scale; a compassionate yet clear-sighted portrait of ordinary people, of their intelligence and determination and anxiety and fear, their courage and cowardice and venery. Above all, the book achieves the thing that historical fiction can do better than anything else: it shows us what made these people tick. Above all, it reveals the moral and social framework of a deeply religious society. Refreshingly for a novel set amidst the atrocities of religious warfare, faith is depicted as a force for good, permeating the society, regulating the lives of the main characters with the ever-present threat of damnation, yet offering comfort and solace as well. Rather than religious bigotry there is theological debate; and throughout, the reader is shown the complexity of the interplay between personal faith, religious allegiance, political expediency, survival and hope. The writing is quiet and unostentatious, evocative of place and time and atmosphere, easing the narrative along smoothly. At the mid-point of the book, however, time stands still to allow a heartstopping description of the sack of the city, a monument to a devastating loss of life and of a way of life, in prose of which a poet would be proud.