Our latest First Impressions selection, Vesna Goldsworthy's Iron Curtain, tells a darkly humorous story of Cold War tensions through a complicated romance between a Soviet "red princess" and a British Marxist poet.

The BookBrowse Book Club is currently discussing You'll Forget This Ever Happened, Laura L. Engel's memoir reflecting on her experience of being forced to give up her son for adoption in the 1960s American South.

In Editor's Choice, we look at Aleksandar Hemon's The World and All That It Holds, which follows a pharmacist from Sarajevo through his relationship with a fellow World War I soldier and beyond.

You can also enjoy our featured read-alikes for Hemon's novel, and a new Wordplay!

With best wishes,

Davina Morgan-Witts

BookBrowse Publisher

Each month we give away books to BookBrowse members who live in the U.S. to read and review. Here are their opinions on one recently released title.

"With her tongue firmly in her cheek, the author speaks to us in the person of Milena Urbanska, the cherished daughter of a 'hero of the Bolshevik Revolution.' By the 1980s, her father is a highly placed official in one of the satellite states behind the Iron Curtain, living in a mansion appropriated from the time of the Czar... Vesna Goldsworthy employs enough irony, satire, and black humor in filling out her characters to give book clubs several months of analysis and discussion... Goldsworthy uses Milena's voice to accept the constraints of her society while also mocking the gap between what could have been and what is, in the reality of the Cold War. The romantic plot twist which brings the Soviet princess out of her country to live in the alleged land of 'milk and honey' with Jason, her English/Irish Marxist poet, takes Milena along the yellow brick road to a place of her own crafting where she shapes the life she wants using her own creativity and grit." - Irene H. (Saugerties, NY)

"I loved this book - right from the start I was drawn into Milena and her story. The beginning is a bit dark, but that is relevant context for the rest of the story. I felt so many emotions reading Iron Curtain - it is sad, funny, disturbing, exciting, confusing, the list goes on. The pace moves quickly and this book is beautifully written. Highly recommend!" - Amber H. (Asheville, NC)

"For those who might be put off by the advertisement of romance, and love story, don't be! That plays a lesser role in the story of two contrasting but controlling cultures. And the absolutely fascinating mindset of this so-called 'red princess.'" - Sonya M. (Takoma Park, MD)

In You'll Forget This Ever Happened, Laura Engel takes us back to the Deep South during the turbulent 1960s to explore the oppression of young women who have committed the socially unacceptable crime of becoming pregnant without a ring on their finger. After being forced to give up her newborn son for adoption, Engel lives inside a fortress of silent shame for fifty years—but when her secret son finds her and her safe world is cracked open, those walls crumble.

"I was captivated by Laura Engel's writing... I married in 1968 and identified with how things were back then. I looked forward to going to bed early every night to see what happened next. Engel was full of hope as young girls are at that age and my heart broke along with hers many times. She knows how to bring all those feelings back to life and I liked this book very much." - JanBB

"I had a bitter sweet experience with this book since I could have written it with relatively minor revisions to the story. I was 16 when I became a birthmother. This story rings very true and is not exaggerated. It’s hard to believe people held such stigmas in that day and time but it was true... This book provides a look inside the lifelong trauma that birth mothers and many birth fathers remember oh so well." - judyg

"Laura Engel has an almost conversational writing style. Many of her words resonated with me, such as, 'Now decades later, I wish I had had the confidence and strength to demand to see Clay. As a young girl in the 1960s, I had no voice. Men decided what was best for me.' Fifty-plus years later, I feel this is still occurring with male legislators making laws for women's bodies!" - helenp

Rafael Pinto, Hemon's latest creation, is perhaps his most romantic and longing character to date. At the beginning of The World and All That It Holds, Pinto is a begrudging but good-humored pharmacist in 1914 Sarajevo. When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand comes to town, Pinto makes a move on a military officer who patronizes his shop. "What is in your heart about your fellow man is likely to be in his heart about you," he tells himself, before kissing the stranger. Good for him! The officer doesn't reciprocate, but Pinto follows him into the parade anyway, close to the Archduke, where he has a front-row seat to the beginning of the end of the world.

Pinto is soon conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army to fight in World War I, where he meets Osman, also a soldier, and their lives intertwine. Osman is charismatic, hairy, brave, a master storyteller, Pinto's lover and protector.

The World and All That It Holds is Hemon's best novel, I think. It combines his interests—war and displacement; fables and storytelling; making sense of history; Sarajevo; espionage in East Asia—into a coherent, emotionally consistent narrative, unlike the incongruent chapters of Nowhere Man or the cynical, affected parallels of The Lazarus Project. ... continued

In Aleksandar Hemon's novel The World and All That It Holds, Rafael Pinto is a Sephardic Jew in Sarajevo at the beginning of the 20th century. When World War I erupts, he's flung east—first to Galicia, in what is now Ukraine and Poland, to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire; then to Tashkent, in what is now Uzbekistan, into a Russian prison; then, on foot, through the Taklamakan Desert. He has no passports or papers, no home to return to. He finally ends up in Shanghai, and lives there for almost 20 years.

Indeed, Shanghai was a safe haven for more than 20,000 Jewish refugees in the 1930s and '40s. Most countries and cities had restricted entry for Jews trying to flee Nazi persecution in Europe. But Shanghai didn't require a visa to enter and had no limit on the number of Jewish people it would accept. As Ronan O'Connell writes in an article for the BBC, it was already a "multicultural oasis—that included British, French, American, Russian, and Iraqi residents," and had an established population of Russian Jews. ... continued

To view more "beyond the book" articles in People, Eras and Events, visit the category page here.

BookBrowse offers carefully handpicked read-alikes for more than 4500 books and 3000 authors, so you can find the perfect recommendations for your tastes based on what you've already read and loved.

Below are three of the titles we recommend if you enjoyed The World and All That It Holds (more are available to members on BookBrowse).

For the book's spectacular chemical reactions to occur, some basic elements have to be methodically poured into the mix. While Lessons puts plot, characters and ideas first, its prose style is routinely insightful and enticing: "Long drives usually settled him into sustained reflection… His little car, nimbler and more spacious than he expected, was a thought-bubble pushing north through a country he no longer quite knew or understood."

Tóibín has created magic in The Magician. In beautiful prose, he has brought Thomas Mann to life and given the reader an intimate look at a great author who lived with contradictions — his acclaim as one of the great 20th-century writers set against his hesitant and secretive inner life; his successful marriage to Katia and their six children set against his repressed homosexuality; and his love for Germany and its culture set against the Nazi ideology he detested. It's a poignant portrayal and a pleasure to read.

Like in life, watershed moments are buried deep within paragraphs; plotlines are dropped and forgotten until hundreds of pages later. Sometimes the book rushes through years and distance so quickly that the narration seems breathless, and yet, without any big dramatic moments, the world feels static—like when you're on a plane and you look at the motionless squares of land beneath you. Afterlives is not a tale of mutiny, or of decisive victory, but rather one of preserving one's autonomy in a world of powerful and sustained external forces.

Solve our Wordplay puzzle to reveal a well-known expression, and be entered to win the book of your choice or a 6-month membership to BookBrowse!

The answer to the last Wordplay: It's A G T Me

Meaning: It's unintelligible.

Some sources say that this expression originates from the notations of Medieval scribes copying Latin text who, if faced with a quote in Greek (or maybe other languages) they could not translate, would write Graecum est, non legitur or Graecum est, non potest legi—It is Greek; it cannot be read.

Although Shakespeare did not coin "it's all Greek to me" (as it's found in an English translation of an Italian play decades earlier), we owe its popularity to his 1599 play, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar ... continued