Steady Hand

A thematic juggling act handled with skill: C.K Stead’s The Secret History of Modernism intersperses a tale of young love with one family’s experience of the Holocaust. Washington Post Reviewer Chris Lehman: “In the hands of a lesser writer, the stylistic unity [of the two stories] might readily give offense, subtly downgrading one of the 20th century’s most gruesome episodes to the level of romantic bathos [… However] Stead’s unadorned style, attentive to small yet telling descriptive flourishes, admirably conveys both the broad upheavals of history and the smaller discombobulations of spirit that make up [the protagonist’s] tale.”