All of You Every Single One
The tale of queer love, family, and freedom in one of the greatest cities of the early 20th century is eloquently depicted in All of You Every Single One by Beatrice Hitchman.
Julia Lindqvist is the unhappy wife of a neglectful Swedish playwright when she meets the stunning Eve Perret, a female tailor, in 1910. After a passionate affair, they place their hopes for a future in the liberal city of Vienna. Falling deeper in love, they struggle to build a life of their own, finding friendship and support from the city’s Jewish quarter. Under the mothering wing of their landlord, Frau Berndt, and the solicitous eye of their charming new gay acquaintance, Rolf, Julia, and Eve create a new family. But Julia’s desire for a child threatens to throw the precarious harmony of their new life into chaos.
Across the city, Ada Bauer is the sheltered teenage daughter of a prominent businessman, desperately in love with Isabella, the wife of her cousin Emil. Struck mute by a storm of emotion and memory, Ada is sent by her worried parents to Dr. Sigmund Freud for treatment. After unlocking her choked voice and freeing her past trauma through the “talking method,” Ada makes a fateful decision to protect an innocent life from her dangerous cousin. The consequences of this event will erupt personally for Rolf, Eve, and Julia decades later amidst the rise of a new political party in Vienna, the Nazis. Hitchman depicts the transformation of Vienna from a haven of liberality for homosexuals and Jews in the 1910s to the paranoid race state of the late 1930s with a chilling sense of doom.
Populated with rich and vibrant characters, All of You Every Single One is a stellar work that blends the best of history and fiction.
