Mary Relindes Ellis Author Event
We are overjoyed to welcome Mary Relindes Ellis back to the store for her latest historical novel, The Bohemian Flats. You may remember her as the author of The Turtle Warrior and her new book is just as good. Mary will join us on Thursday, July 31st from 6:00 t0 7:00 p.m. to discuss her latest book. This is a free wine and cheese event and reservations are requested. For more information about this event, please contact us at 231.347.1180 or send us an email.
--
In The Bohemian Flats, Mary Relindes Ellis's rich, imaginative gift carries us from the bourgeois world of fin de siecle Germany to a vibrant immigrant enclave in the heart of the Midwest and to the killing fields of World War I.
Shell shock, as it was called, lands Raimund Kaufmann in a London hospital, a victim of the war but also of his own, and his brother's, efforts to get out of Germany and build a new life in America. While his recovery eludes him, his memory returns us to Minneapolis, to the Flats, a milling community on the Mississippi River, where Raimund and his brother Albert have sought respite from the oppressive hand of their older brother, now the master of the family farm and brewery. In Minnesota the brothers confront different forms of prejudice, but they also find a chance to remake their lives according to their own principles and wishes--until the war makes their German roots inescapable.
Following these lives, The Bohemian Flats conjures both the sweep of irresistible history and the intimate reality of a man, and a family, caught up in it. From a nineteenth-century German farm to the thriving, wildly diverse immigrant village below Minneapolis on the Mississippi to the European front in World War I, and returning to twentieth-century America--this is a story that takes a reader to the far reaches of human experience and the depths of the human heart.
--
Mary Relindes Ellis was born in Glidden, Wisconsin. She began her writing career publishing short stories. Her first novel, The Turtle Warrior, won the Wisconsin Library’s Association’s 2005 Banta Award for Literary Achievement, was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Awards, was an Official Pulpwood Queens Book Club Selection, made Amazon.com’s 25 fiction picks of 2004, and was a BookSense Pick.
In The Bohemian Flats, Mary Relindes Ellis’s rich, imaginative gift carries us from the bourgeois world of fin de siècle Germany to a vibrant immigrant enclave in the heart of the Midwest and to the killing fields of World War I.
Shell shock, as it was called, lands Raimund Kaufmann in a London hospital, a victim of the war but also of his own, and his brother’s,
The Turtle Warrior is the story of the Lucas family, who live in a beautiful and remote part of Wisconsin inhabited by working-class European immigrants and the Ojibwe. By 1967 the Lucas farm has fallen into disrepair, thanks to the hard drinking of John Lucas, who brutalizes his wife and two sons.