The Hidden River

by Augustus Goetz, Ruth Goetz, Storm Jameson (Source Material)

Beckley describes "It all takes place during twenty-four hours in a quiet French house on the Loire when an Englishman returns to visit the family that sheltered him during the desperate days of the war. His return coincides with the return from prison of the eldest member of the family, who was locked away five years for continuing during wartime an old friendship with a German general, as intellectual if not as completely immured in the peaceful pre-war world as he. Behind everybody and every action stands the figure of a resistance leader, Robert, who was captured at Orleans in 1944 and tortured to death by the invaders. He peers out of the grief-pained eyes of his mother, the guilt-clouded vision of the senior brother of the house and the Englishman who counts him a friend. All of these people are driven by an anguished need to identify his betrayer "

Genres: Fiction

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

Reviews

[The goblin queen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a decent book. It was well written but I'm just not that into books that take place within atleast twenty years after the second world war.

[Ashley Vaughan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in 1955, this takes the same format of a lot of books I have read from that era in that it takes place over just a few short, post-war days, in this instance, in France. It starts off slow and lacking a bit in enticing plot, but when you get to the second half, the author adroitly brings together all the threads she had been weaving loosely earlier in the novel. Enter murder, intrigue, romance and a tangled web of lies and treachery, all tied together in the most human and gratifying of ways at the climax.

For a 60-year-old novel, it is piercingly astute and insightful; ultra-relevant to a modern readership. Staggering.