Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone-food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt.

Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. A sequel is rumored.Īlthough heavy on the sex and sensationalism, there’s also intelligence and empathy under the energetic potboiler surface. Now the stage is set for Theodora’s legitimization, first as wife, next as the Emperor’s consort. Back in Constantinople she is introduced to Justinian, the Emperor’s favorite nephew, who likes her so much he changes the law forbidding actresses to marry in order to wed her. This role, begun cynically, later turns sincere, and she agrees to work undercover for the church. Desperate to return to Constantinople, Theodora pretends to be a penitent Christian for the chance of a voyage home. At 17, bored but ambitious, she leaves Constantinople with her lover Hecebolus, the new Governor of the Pentapolis in Africa, but that relationship ends when Hecebolus takes another lover. A quick mind, a bold spirit, innate talent and a merciless teacher render Theodora a star by age 12 when she also starts work as a whore. The book is being for HBO.īritish novelist Duffy ( State of Happiness, 2004) uses modern vocabulary to enliven her historical novel- “bitch,” “slut,” “bloke” and worse pepper the pages as she recounts the lurid life of the bear-keeper’s daughter trained for the stage from age five. The unexpurgated story of Theodora, performer and prostitute in Roman Constantinople, destined to rise above her hardscrabble life to become the Emperor’s wife.

Theodora by stella duffy