We see the women grapple with private wounds and painful secrets, each responding in her own way to the pressures of living under fascist rule. How they reconcile their very different experiences, opportunities for survival, and overarching sensibilities and worldviews is one of the major driving forces of the novel. Devastated by trauma, broken by the deprivations and brutality they suffered in the war, and burdened by their own guilt they join Marianne and her children with the hope of recovering from their suffering and loss, and finding peace in the aftermath of war. Marianne, raising three children by herself, creates an odd new family by bringing to the castle the widows and children of the murdered men. The war has ended and the conspirators have been executed after their failed attempt to assassinate Hitler.

The novel then advances to the year 1945.

Countess Marianne von Lingenfels is hosting her family’s annual party, at which men wearing Nazi insignia parade casually through the grounds, drinks and canapés in hand, while in the inner sanctum a small group of intense young men, including Marianne’s husband, are plotting armed resistance against the nation’s leader, who they consider to be a thug and a madman. The story begins at the site of a Bavarian castle in 1938, with detailed descriptions of the sweeping opulence of the pre-war days in Germany among a certain class of landed aristocrats. Set primarily in Germany before, during and after World War II, much of the story is told in flashbacks that allow us glimpses of the lives of three women and their children who were bound together by their experiences during the Nazi era.

The result is a gripping, incisive and deeply heart-opening novel. Jessica Shattuck, a journalist and author of two previous novels, has said that she was compelled to write The Women in the Castle because of the deep sense of shame she felt regarding her German heritage.

The women in the castle