My great-grandmother has only eighteen days to go. There's no need for alarm though. The doctors have not predicted her precise date of death, nor has she threatened hyper-geriatric suicide on that specific date. No, in eighteen days' time she will become the world's oldest person. Ever...
***
"I am the oldest person ever to have lived in this world. I am the one who lived through their monster camps and brought the ones left of my family to London to make more family. I am the one to laugh at those angry, evil people and tell them, you see, I made it through. We made it through. This is enough. It is my world's record."
Family matriarch and Holocaust survivor Nora Wojnaswki is about to become the oldest person in the world, ever, and her family are determined to celebrate in style.
But Nora isn’t your average centenarian and she has other ideas. When she disappears with her carer Arifa on a trip down memory lane in the East End of London, a wartime secret, buried deep for over 70 years, will finally be revealed.
***
I frequently have several books on the go at one time. I suspect many book bloggers are the same as we have review deadlines to meet for blog tours and so on. But sometimes, I get to read a book for pleasure, and what a wonderfully pleasurable experience reading this book was. Amongst, the several books I was reading, this was the one which kept calling to me to pick it up again.
Nora is one of the best characters I have come across in my reading. She is 122 years old, rather curmudgeonly but with a mostly sharp brain and a sense of humour. However, she does not suffer fools gladly and when her family decide to throw a huge party for her on the day she officially becomes the oldest person in the world, she is not slow in making her feelings known in that she would rather spend it quietly.
When she leaves her care home to stay with Arifa, who is one of her carers and a refugee from Aleppo, her family are outraged. But Nora is back in the East End of London where all her memories are, and she is determined to stay put. Both women have lived through the horrors and losses of war. They have more in common than even they realise.
In both Nora and Arifa the author has created two fantastic characters. Strong women with a lifetime of traumatic experiences behind them. Nora has been based on the author's own mother-in-law and her writing demonstrates how clearly she understands her character. There is an authenticity to her that she has captured perfectly.
Although there is reference to the past the book is very much set in the here and now. When one of the characters has an accident the action shifts very much to the present. But for Nora, it creates a blending of past and present and the reader is given further insight into her past.
It is a powerful and heartfelt book to read, and I loved every single word of it. It is a book to make you laugh and cry. I do not think I will ever forget Nora and I highly recommend this book.
This is Ms. Green's debut novel, and I am sincerely hoping that she has more books in the pipeline.
ISBN: 978 0008562526
Publisher: One More Chapter
Formats: e-book, audio and paperback
No. of Pages: 384 (paperback)
About the Author:
Originally from London, Cate Green now lives and writes in Lyon, France.
Her debut novel The Curious Kidnapping of Nora W. was inspired by her late mother-in-law, a resilient and feisty Holocaust survivor who lived almost as long as Nora herself. It won the 2019 Exeter Novel Prize.
Cate is a broadcast and print journalist and copywriter with over twenty years’ experience in international radio, television and corporate communications. She is currently working on her second novel.
(author media courtesy of the author's website https://www.categreen.co.uk/about)
(all opinions are my own)
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