About the Book
When Danielle Marton's father is killed during the early days of the German occupation of France, her mother sends her to live in a quiet farming town. Now called Marie-Jean Chantier, Danielle struggles to balance the truth of what's happened to her family and her country with the lies she must tell to keep herself safe. At first, she's bitter about being left behind by her mother, and horrified at having to milk the cows and memorise Catholic prayers for church. But as the years pass, Danielle finds it easier to suppress her former life entirely, and Marie-Jean becomes less and less of an act. By the time she's fifteen and there is talk amongst the now divided town of an Allied invasion, Danielle has transformed into a strict Catholic, a fervent disciple of fascism, as well as a German collaborator.
About the Author :
Tara Ison is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and short story writer. She is the author of three novels: The List (Scribner), A Child out of Alcatraz (Faber & Faber), a Finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize,
and Rockaway (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press), featured as one of the "Best Books of Summer" in O, The Oprah Magazine, July 2013. Ball, a short story collection, was published in 2015, and her collection of essays, Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies, was winner of the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her short fiction, essays, poetry and book reviews have appeared in Tin House, BOMB, Salon, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Nerve.com, Black Clock, TriQuarterly, The Mississippi Review, The Santa Monica Review, Publishers Weekly, The Week, LA Weekly, O, the Oprah Magazine, and numerous anthologies.
Ison received her MFA in fiction and literature from Bennington College. She is currently professor of fiction in Arizona State University's creative writing program. In another life, she was the co-writer of the cult classic film Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (1991).
Review :
A New York Times Editors Choice
"Sends us to the dusk that borders the familiar and the wild, the known and the unknown. It's where our beliefs and suspicions can cast dark shadows over our lives. And, of course, the lives of others."--New York Times
"Brilliant, timely, and chilling."--People
"[A] piercing Holocaust novel...There are costs to living a lie, and there's madness in forgetting...Beneath the bucolic scenes of Tara Ison's novel are foreboding realities. Neighbors turn against neighbors; fascism creeps up; 'good' people avert their eyes...Even at the novel's gripping end...[there are] questions about what moral compromises are the acceptable cost of survival."--Foreword Reviews (starred review)
"A Jewish girl comes of age in Vichy France, relentlessly deformed by the spiritual rot of her era...Ison is unflinching in her depiction of the self-inflicted corruption that replaces the character's moral core with a twisted version of Christianity, brilliantly illustrating the epigraph from Solzhenitsyn: 'To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good.'...Free of sentiment but not without hope of redemption, this is a suspenseful and chilling story."--Kirkus (starred review)
"A chilling psychological portrait of a young Jewish girl hiding in France during WWII...Finely drawn characters and scenes of rural life complement Ison's unique vision and original spin on a familiar set-up. This challenging work stands out among historical fiction of the period."--Publishers Weekly
"Tara Ison's first novel was a finalist for the LA Times Book Awards. Another made The Oprah Magazine's 'Best Books of Summer List.' This winter we can't wait to get our hands on her latest...A disturbingly timely story."--Los Angeles Daily News
"Marie-Jeanne Chantier is a young French Catholic girl with a secret. She's not really Catholic, and her name isn't Marie-Jeanne Chantier at all. In reality, her name is Danielle Marton, and she's a Jew hiding in the French countryside during the Nazi occupation of France...Read if you're into psychological drama and cottagecore."--Hey Alma
"A suspenseful and disturbing psychological story of an adolescent Jewish girl, relocated from Paris to a small village in Vichy during WWII and hiding with a Catholic family, who becomes increasingly and dangerously aligned with her invented identity. Written in exquisite prose, Tara Ison's novel of persona, identity and survival in collaborationist France is chilling and profoundly moving."--JANET FITCH, author, White Oleander and Paint it Black
"At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf is a thrilling novel, not just as a splendid read but as a deeply resonant work of art driven by the central yearning in the greatest literary narratives: the yearning for a self, for an identity, for a place in the world. Tara Ison has always been a writer I've ardently admired. Here she is at the height of her estimable powers."--ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Paris in the Dark
"Tara Ison's riveting historical novel, At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf, takes the reader into Vichy France in the early 1940s at the moment when ordinary life shifts into complicity with horror, as the Free French government first accommodates the Nazi regime then amplifies its fascist, anti-Semitic project. Told from the perspective of a young Jewish girl grappling with identity, Ison's timely book considers that moment between dusk and night, the almost imperceptible shift into darkness, both political and personal, as it exposes the high cost of accommodation of evil and bigotry. Provocative, vivid, and affecting, this novel will inspire important conversations that we all need to be having now."--EJ LEVY, author of The Cape Doctor
