A Feather on the Water
Three women from three different countries travel to Bavaria in 1945 to join the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to help manage a displaced persons’ camp. Martha Radford comes from New York hoping to use her expertise as the manager of a food distribution center on the Lower East Side and to move on after leaving her alcoholic husband. Kitty Bloom makes the journey in search of her parents, who sent her from Vienna to England as a teenager to protect her at the start of WWII. Delphine Fabius travels from Paris to find solace after the deaths of her husband and son in Dachau.
The women oversee the living conditions and workings of the camp and find ways to adjust to the challenges: different languages, short supplies, ever-increasing refugee arrivals. In the process, the women make friends with one another and others in the camp, learn to put their pasts behind them, and take meaningful steps forward.
A Feather on the Water is the latest novel by the best-selling author of The Woman on the Orient Express, about Agatha Christie, and The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen, which was adapted for radio and broadcast on BBC Radio in 2014.
While this novel weaves shadows of memory within a narrative of day-by-day operations of the camp in Seidenmühre, it doesn’t fully capture a sense of time or place. Neither plotting nor characters are layered. Questions about the meaning of actions or reactions are distracting and beg for resolution. Actions and storyline are predictable. An apt title, Feather floats on the surface.
