About the featured author:
From the author’s website:
Anna Bliss has an MA in Literature and Visual Culture from the University of Sussex, where she wrote her dissertation on women’s narratives of the London Blitz during World War II. An alumna of the juried Northern California Writers’ Retreat, she also has studied at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Social Welfare, the American Jewish University, and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. Her professional background includes over ten years in marketing and arts administration. Bonfire Night is her first novel. Readers can connect with her on Instagram at @annablissauthor.
About Anna’s book Bonfire Night:
BARNES & NOBLE BESTSELLER
PUBLISHERS MARKETPLACE BUZZ BOOK FALL 2023/WINTER 2024
HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE
Set before and during World War II, this moving, intricately wrought historical novel brings together a young Irish Catholic photographer and a British Jewish medical student, each discovering the price of love, art, and ambition.
London, 1936: At twenty-one, Kate Grifferty is a press photographer in a Fleet Street agency, an unusual job for a young woman. But Kate is both talented and daring, recklessly going wherever the story might be—including, one October day, to an anti-fascism protest in East London. There, she meets David Rabatkin, a brilliant Jewish medical student. While his idealistic brother is eager to go to Spain and join the fight for the Republic, David knows where his path lies: at home, fulfilling the expectations of his profession and his family.
Kate is exposed for the first time to the dangers and demands of David’s world, where marrying within the Jewish faith is seen as not only preferable, but key to survival. Kate neither expects nor wants to be any man’s wife, hampered by convention. And though she and David are both outsiders, as war looms, other differences between them are thrown into sharp relief.
Brighton, 1940: Catastrophe forces Kate to flee London and the onslaught of war finds her working at her sister’s seaside boarding house, while David tends patients at a busy London hospital as the Blitz rages. But Kate’s challenges and disappointments have only deepened her desire to capture images of life unfurling around her, the beauty and violence, struggles and surprising joys. And soon fate and ambition will align, providing her with the chance to make her mark at last . . .
Praise:
“[A] tightly structured and beautifully written novel…Anna Bliss depicts [the characters’] passion and their conflicts with a perceptive eye in this moving, complicated story. Bonfire Night’s distinctive angle on WWII impacts the unique Juliet and Romeo scenario, compelling and surprising readers from the beginning to the epilogue, set in 1945. Highly recommended.”
“[A] tender debut about the price of female ambition….At times wrenching but also emotionally rewarding.”
“[A] wrenching debut…the story comes alive in Bliss’s meticulous account of the threats of fascism and antisemitism as well as in her exploration of the messiness of love and family. This is a well-crafted contribution to WWII fiction.”
“Bonfire Night is a remarkably impressive debut and a most tender work of art, providing a heartrending look at a couple in love while the world implodes and explodes around them. With the eye of a painter, Bliss uses the finest of brushes to vividly and crisply depict her characters while displaying an astonishing breadth of compassion for the situations in which they must struggle and persevere. Bonfire Night is a treasure of a novel, beautifully written with the unflinching style and subtle psychological insights of such masters as Ian McEwan and Graham Swift.”
—Natalie Jenner, internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls
“This beautifully written, timely historical novel encompasses so much – difficult family ties, female ambition, and the sacrifices we make for love. With her meticulous research and heartrending descriptions of life in Brighton during the war, Anna Bliss had me turning the pages into the night.”
—Janet Skeslien Charles, New York Times and international bestselling author of The Paris Library
Author visits:
Author visits with Anna are available via Adventures by the Book here.