Resonance: A Novel

by Michael S. Tobin, Daniel S. Chertoff

PARIS, 1971

In the basement of Shakespeare and Company, Sophie Hadad—a restless Wellesley student from Charleston, West Virginia, motherless and adrift—uncovers a forgotten valise. Inside lies the diary of Anna Grinberg, a Jewish sculptor born in Warsaw in 1900, orphaned when her father is murdered in a pogrom and her mother is claimed by the Spanish flu.

PARIS, 1922

Anna arrives in the city with nothing but her will to create. Her diary is fierce, intimate, and unsparing—alive with the pulse of Les Années Folles, when Montparnasse cafés throb with painters, sculptors, and expatriate writers reinventing art and language. She fights to carve a place among Pascin, Bourdelle, and Frenkel; finds allies in Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier; and collides—dangerously—with Ernest Hemingway. Even in those incandescent years, she senses the gathering shadow over Europe and writes as if time itself were fragile.

Half a century later, Sophie bends over Anna’s words and feels them press against her own life. The diary refuses to remain merely historical. It exposes her evasions, unsettles her defiance, and forces a reckoning with identity, inheritance, and the past she has tried to escape.

Resonance unfolds in two distinct Anna’s impassioned diary, lyrical and immediate, and Sophie’s sharp, searching, contemporary narrative. Together they tell a story of art, exile, and Jewish survival—passed not through monuments or archives, but from one woman’s hand to another—across time.

328 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2026

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoever saves one life, it is as if they have saved an entire world.

This is a moving novel that hooks you deeper the longer you read.

It begins in 1971 with a ‘tumbleweed’ working for the legendary Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, the store begun by Sylvia Beach who was the first to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses, the store where the cutting-edge writers of the 1920s gathered.

Sophie Hadad has rejected and left her life in Charleston, West Virginia to travel and find herself. As a tumbleweed, the store manager George allows her to crash at the store in exchange for a few hours of work and the requirement to read a book a day. She is tasked to sort through an attic to find lost treasures. She discovers letters and bills and ephemera related to James Joyce, Ernest Hemmingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Beach, which she shares with George.

She also discovers a valise holding a flapper dress and a diary which she does not share with George. Every day, she reads more of the journal, engrossed in the life of Anna, a woman who left Poland for Paris to become a sculptor. Her father had died in a pogrom, her mother of the Spanish Flu. Her beloved grandfather sent her to Paris with his blessing to fulfill her gift. Much of the diary is about art and creation, with reference to writers and artists who became culture icons.

Anna’s apartment was near that of a writer named Ernest Hemmingway. He pursues her. Anna keeps an emotional distance while falling for his sexual allure, but they can’t seem to make it work.

I write like a sculptor carves…removing the dross until the essence emerges. Ernest Hemmingway in Resonance

They talk about art and writing and creativity. Hemmingway explains that Cezanne taught him how to write, to look “not just at the surface but the structure underneath.” It helps him to pare his writing to the bone.

Anna finds work as a model and studies under Bourdelle who teaches her to see beyond the surface. She develops stunning art. With the coming of war, the art market dries up and Anna becomes a welder, learning skills that takes her work to a new level.

Anna meets her soul mate. The description of their dancing the tango is more erotic than any bedroom scene. As Nazi Germany takes over Europe, Anna and her husband work to transport Jews to safety, risking everything. By this time, I couldn’t put the book down.

Sophie is changed by Anna’s story, which offers her insight into her own mistrust and confusion, allowing her to grow and open to a relationship.

Cezanne…You painted it again and again. You had to. It was always another mountain. The light changed; the angle changed; the artist changed; the viewer changed. from Resonance


Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1904, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Anna and Ernest talk about Cezanne’s Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which I had seen many times at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They discus Hemmingway’s work, including the Nick Adams stories set in Michigan and The Sun Also Rises, which I have read a half dozen times since my teen years. Anna thinks, “This is literature stripped raw, just exposed nerve endings on the page.” She wants to save Ernest from himself, who tells her, “I’m a man who’s seen too much to believe in salvation, but not enough to stop looking.”

I understand Sophie’s engrossment by the diary. Decades ago I found a 1919 diary by a Jewish woman in her last year of college in St. Louis. I was so charmed that I researched everything she wrote about and created a family tree on Ancestry. I shared her story on my blog and her family found what I wrote. I was able to return the diary to the nieces and nephews who loved her.

Deeply psychological, with thoughtful exploration into the role of art in healing, and a main character who captures our heart, this is an exceptional read.

Thanks to Subplot and Caitlin Hamilton Summie for a free book.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Resonance is a historical novel told in two timelines. In 1971, Sophie Haddad, an American, is living and working at Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. When she is asked to go through old documents in the basement, she discovers several diaries that become her obsession. In 1922, Anna Grinberg arrives in Paris where she hones her craft as a sculptor. Her diaries go through 1940, with the Nazi threat ever-present in Paris.

I wanted to read Resonance because I love historical fiction. I enjoy books set in Paris, and the Shakespeare and Company setting was appealing.

This is an interesting book. It starts as Sophie's story, as she seeks healing from her sad early years, and a sense of direction. Then there is a long section told in diary format, chronicling Anna's life over the span of 1922 - 1940. The book concludes with Sophie making sense of what to do next with the discovery of the diaries.

It took me a little bit to immerse myself in the world of this book. The storytelling is formal and stylized. Sophie and Anna's smallest encounters have very high dramatic stakes, so we don't see a lot of quiet, everyday life. For instance, Sophie meets different people in a park and has very deep conversations with them right away.

That said, I found both their lives interesting and especially found the impact of Anna's story on Sophie to be compelling. I found the epigraph for Part I of Sophie's story to be absolutely perfect: "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (William Faulkner).

Anna's story is a winding one - including encounters with Ernest Hemingway, and living in the orbit of Gertrude Stein. That glimpse of 1920's Paris was fascinating.

I also liked Anna's insights on her journaling process:

"Here is a truth: I write after thirty-one days of silence to force myself to understand why I do not want to write. That is a lie. I know why. If I write, it is real. If I do not, memories fade like mist, and pain dulls" (p. 126).

Resonance is a sensitively told novel that meanders through history and through big thoughts and themes (love, art, personal vision) in a serious way. It is both historical fiction and a distinctly voiced literary novel.

[Kati Berman · Rating 2.75 out of 5]

I am getting a little tired of the plots, where someone finds a diary in the present and while reading it we go back in the past. It is that plot in this novel, where Sophie finds the diary of Anna who was a Jewish sculptor in Paris during the pre war years. I didn’t get far into the book, before I gave up, I just couldn’t get into it.
No more than three stars. I received a complimentary copy, opinions are my own.

[Munevver · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just could not get into this book. I'm sure its more me than the book, seem to be fighting off a reading slump.

Great main character, the dual timeline in Paris, a found diary - all things that would fascinate me in a book.

[Liz]

Great read.