Last Light
Novels
By:
Elizabeth Farnsworth
Last Light follows Isabelle Graham, a young woman hired in the summer of 1943 to interpret for German POWs at a Kansas Army hospital. Still haunted by childhood secrets, she’s drawn into a dangerous moral struggle that reaches far beyond the prairie and into the heart of a war still raging overseas.
Moving between Kansas and the cafés of Vienna, author Elizabeth Farnsworth explores the shifting lines between honor and betrayal, revealing how the true history of war lives in the hidden choices, conflicted emotions, and quiet acts of courage of ordinary people.
“In the summer of 1943, a young woman is hired to interpret for German prisoners of war at a U.S. Army Hospital in Kansas. Harboring dark secrets from her childhood, Isabelle Graham will be forced into a struggle that saves her own life as well as many others in the distant, ongoing war. Farnsworth has written in Last Light a thrilling and moving account of a young woman's courage and determination in the face of seemingly insuperable odds.”
-- John Balaban, National Book Awards poetry finalist, 1997 and 1975, and author of, among other non-fiction works, Remembering Heaven’s Face: A Story of Rescue in Wartime Vietnam.
“In an intriguing tale that moves seamlessly between the Kansas prairie and the cafés of Vienna, Elizabeth Farnsworth asks where honor ends and betrayal begins, or maybe it’s the other way around. War stories are often painted in the bold colors of military and political giants and knaves, but the real history of war is wrapped around the spirits and emotions, often in conflict with each other, of people whose tales get lost in time. Thanks to Elizabeth Farnsworth for making these realities so vivid.”
-- Michael D. Mosettig, Foreign Affairs and Defense Senior Producer and Editor of The PBS NewsHour from 1985 to 2012, has written for, among other publications, The Economist, The New Republic, and the Online NewsHour.
“This extraordinary short novel, Last Light, follows a young woman, Isabelle Graham, from Vienna to Topeka to Nuremberg, telling a World War II story unlike any others. It is at once a coming-of-age tale, a morality tale, and a dark fairy tale inspired by the Brothers Grimm’s "The Juniper Tree." Compact and complex, Elizabeth Farnsworth’s story evokes beautifully the innocence of a Kansas childhood, a woman’s sexual and intellectual awakening, and the physical and psychic wounds of war with its inherent moral ambiguities. The central question—When is killing justified?—haunts until the end.”
-- Marion Abbott, Former co-owner of Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, Berkeley, California.