The Scrapbook

A Novel

De: Heather Clark

From the award-winning author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, a stunning debut novel: the story of an intense first love haunted by history and family memory, inspired by the startling WWII scrapbook of Clark’s own grandfather, hidden in an attic until after his death

The traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism echo and reverberate through the present in this story of a lifechanging seduction.

Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation’s recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen.

As Anna travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, her perspective is powerfully interrupted by chapters that follow both of their grandfathers during the war. One witnesses the plight of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation and helps capture Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, while the other fights for Nazi Germany. Their fragmented stories haunt Anna and her lover two generations later—and may still tear them apart.

Not a “World War Two novel” in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming tale of first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies and historical conscience.

©2025 Heather Clark (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Heather Clark’s The Scrapbook is a masterpiece. This beautifully crafted, quietly devastating love story reminds us of the epic impact of the Second World War across continents and through generations, its scars perhaps most poignantly felt in the intimate interactions between two solitary people."—Rebecca Donner, New York Times bestselling author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

“Through an exquisitely observed love affair, Clark explores how the Nazis' lingering legacy can still haunt the lives of those born long after the war. A stunningly good novel.”—Julia Boyd, Sunday Times bestselling author of A Village in the Third Reich

"Ingeborg Bachmann once asked, “When will the war be over?” Heather Clark’s debut novel, The Scrapbook, offers an answer to this timeless question in a work of searing tenderness. An intimate portrait of youthful romance, haunted by the shadow of the Second World War, Clark meticulously captures the melancholy inheritance of a generation trying to find their place amidst the rubble of the past. The initiations of first love, the scars it leaves behind, The Scrapbook reminds us that we’re never as far from history as we’d like to imagine, and it reminds us just how much we must give up in order to move on. Beautifully written, brilliantly researched. A stunning quiet work you won’t be able to put down."—Samantha Rose Hill, author of Hannah Arendt and What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt