The Hungarian Gold Train, loaded with Jewish treasure. A dazzling jewelled pendant in the form of a stylized peacock. And three men who find their carefully-wrought lives turned upside-down by three amazing and fierce women, each locked in a struggle against her own history and the history or our times... Maine, 2012. An old man id dying with the weight of a plundered necklace on his conscience. As an US Army Captain in 1946 Salburg, guarding the 'Hungarian Gold Train' full of looted Jewish treasure, he fell in love with camp survivor and helped her escape to Israel. Now, as his granddaughter sets out to repatriate the necklace, secrets buried in the past are uncoverd, stories of love and deceit linked to that beautiful, peacock-shaped pendant and to a priceless, long-lost painting. spanning a century of European and Jewish history, from 1913 Budapest to comtemporary Israel, and filled with a vivid supporting cast of art dealers, freedom fighters, psychoanalysts and suffragette dwarfs, LOVE AND TREASURE is a thrilling, moving and haunting novel, one that bears an ever elusive question at its core, nested like a photograph hidden in a locket: where does the worth of a people and its treasure truly lie?
About the Author :
Ayelet Waldman is an essayist and author of several books including Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and The New York Times bestseller Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace. Her personal essays and profiles of such public figures as Hillary Clinton have been published in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former criminal defense lawyer. Waldman currently lives in Berkeley, California with her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband Michael Chabon, their four children, and their Bernese mountain dog Fanny.
Jonathan Davis has received widespread critical acclaim for his narration in a variety of genres. He has won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration in 2009, 2011, and 2012, as well as being a finalist for an Audie in 2007, 2013, and three times in 2014. He has also garnered accolades from Publishers Weekly, USA Today, and AudioFile magazine.
Paul Hecht's long career in audiobooks spans dozens of titles and authors as varied as Ray Bradbury and Gore Vidal, Jack Finney and Thomas Mann. He has recorded such books as Bob Dole's One Soldier's Story and Alexander McCall Smith's Portuguese Irregular Verbs and At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances. Hecht's theater career in New York includes many Broadway and television credits. He has won nine AudioFile Earphones Awards for his audiobook narrations.
Review :
"Love and Treasure is something of a treasure trove of a novel. Its beautifully integrated parts fit inside one another like the talismanic pendant/locket at the heart of several love stories. Where the opening chapters evoke the nightmare of Europe in the aftermath of World War II with the hallucinatory vividness of Anselm Kiefer's disturbing canvases, the concluding chapters, set decades before, in a more seemingly innocent time in the early twentieth century, are a bittersweet evocation, in miniature, of thwarted personal destinies that yet yield to something like cultural triumph. Ayelet Waldman is not afraid to create characters for whom we feel an urgency of emotion, and she does not resolve what is unresolvable in this ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving work of fiction."
-- "Joyce Carol Oates, multi-award winning author"
"A necklace with a peacock pendant raises provocative questions about loss, guilt, and recovery in Waldman's intriguing new novel...Strong storytelling combined with thoughtful exploration of difficult issues."
-- "Kirkus Reviews"
"A sensitive and heartbreaking portrayal of love, politics, and family secrets...Waldman's appealing novel recalls the film The Red Violin in its following of this all-important object through various periods in history and through many owners. Fans of historical fiction will love the compelling characters and the leaps backward and forward in time."
-- "Library Journal"
"As Waldman takes us back to Hungary, first in the aftermath of the war, then to the years preceding it, she evokes what it feels like to have your identity and your community stripped from you and how impossibly foolish it can be to think your personal destiny is within your control. With its complicated politics and moral ambiguity, this provocative novel tells a fascinating story."
-- "Booklist"
"Love and Treasure places the Hungarian Gold Train at the heart of a multigenerational tale...Crucial to its plot is an enameled pendant, intricately worked in the design of a peacock, unusually colored in purple, white, and green. Waldman skillfully interweaves this striking and enigmatic object--a symbol, as the book progresses, of fatal bad luck--into an ambitious sweep of history, setting the loss of millions of human lives against the pendant's own poignant, improbably survival...Waldman sustains her multiple plot lines with breathless confidence and descriptive panache, fashioning complex personalities caught up in an inexorable series of events...Powerful."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
"One is quickly caught up in Love and Treasure with its shifting tones and voices--at times a document, a thriller, a love story, a search--telescoping time backwards and forwards to vividly depict a story found in the preludes and then the after-effects of the Holocaust. Waldman gives us remarkable characters in a time of complex and surprising politics."
-- "Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize-winning author"
"This lush, multigenerational tale...traces the path of a single pendant....Inventively told from multiple perspectives, Waldman's latest is a seductive reflection on just how complicated the idea of 'home' is--and why it is worth more than treasure."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
