Unfortunate Stars by Susan Lanigan
Czechoslovakia, 1938 - Friedrich Pflommer, a married man with two children, has fallen hopelessly in love with the most unsuitable person possible - the young, volatile Kai, an exchange student living under his own roof. As Nazi forces gather on the border, Friedrich is playing a high-stakes game and risks losing everything.
France, 1915 - as a young lieutenant in wartime, Friedrich is badly injured during a failed counterattack, but a meeting with an Englishman during battle changes everything.
Unfortunate Stars is a short story of romantic love and deep friendship between men, of what it is to surrender to our own truth, and to live it even in the hardest of circumstances.
About the author
I graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in English and History in the late 90s, then pursued a Graduate Diploma in I.T. in Dublin City University and a Masters in Writing in NUI Galway.
My first novel White Feathers, a tale of passion, betrayal and war, was selected as one of the final ten in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair, 2013, and published in 2014 by Brandon Books. The book won critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the UK Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2015.
My second novel, Lucia’s War, also concerning WWI as well as race, music and motherhood, was published in June 2020 and has been named as the Coffee Pot Book Club Honourable Mention in the Modern Historical Book of the Year Award.
Review
‘Unfortunate Stars’ is a bittersweet tale of love that captured my heart. I listened to the audiobook to review this short story and I feel that this meant it had a greater impact on me as a reader. The narrator, Greg Patmore, did an amazing job in expressing the tender emotions and fears which this story contains.
The part of the story that drew me in was the part set in 1915. First of all to lose a close friend right in front of you but then be injured yourself. The scenes between Friedreich and his saviour were stellar. Them trying to find a common language and they end up using the dead language of Latin. It's this that haunts me from this story.
It's a shame that this was a short story as I'm sure there is much more the author could have delved into but that's me just being greedy as I enjoyed it! It's an area of WWII history that isn't explored as much and a longer story would have been wonderful to add to the discussion and discourse on the topic.
Let me know if you listen to this.
