A Review of Three Books by Jonathan Hull

If you like historical fiction, and particularly historical fiction about World War I, then you’ll love Losing Julia. Told from three different time frames—during the war, ten years after, and then years later from a nursing home, Hull weaves a story filled with many memorable characters that stay with you long after the last page is turned. It’s a big, sprawling novel to get lost in, revolving around a central theme of trying to find what is lost, but never being able to and having to rely on memory and the story as consolation. Losing Julia begins in 1928 at the dedication of a memorial to the Great War in France. The protagonist, Patrick Dulaney, has come to mourn his fallen comrades, particularly his best friend, Daniel. He spies a woman in the crowd who he guesses rightly is Daniel’s great love, Julia, who Patrick falls desperately in love with. And so begins the story of great love found and lost, due to life’s obligations and trickeries. Their love is doomed, for Patrick is unhappily married with a small son, and feels the guilt and regret and will not leave his family. From the horrors of trench warfare and the friendships forged during war, to the friendships made in a nursing home, and the often comic and tragic indignities faced there, Hull gives us the life of a man who was and is filled with desire, longing, memories, regrets. The language is that good, too, and Hull’s use of figurative language that he peppers the story with.

“After we finished the brandies we walked back to the hotel, pausing to stare up at the sky, which hung over us like an immense sieve, sifting the light.”

“Daniel MacGuire and I had been up all night laying barbed wire, and now sat in a communications trench smoking cigarettes, which we kept carefully cupped in our hands like captured butterflies.

And philosophical ruminations about the nature of love and loss abound.

“So who is better off, those who share love long enough to see which parts inevitably fade or those who lose their love when it is still pristine? I think each is lonely in a different place, though if you lose your love while it is still perfect you at least have a clear explanation for your grief, while if it gradually crumbles in your hands you do not.”


“Love is the only anesthesia that actually works.”


“Without love we are like songbirds who cannot sing.”

I was a tad disappointed with a major plot point toward the end of the novel which seemed a bit contrived—an unbelievable coincidence that attempts to tie up the novel into a neat package. But all in all, Losing Julia is an exciting, full read. I wouldn’t miss it.


I was so engrossed with this love story that I immediately read Jonathan Hull’s other historical fictions, The Distance from Normandy and The Devoted, both from the perspective of two different characters retrospectively reliving their experiences during World War II. As with in Losing Julia, these books deal with characters trying to reconcile their often irreconcilable pasts with their present, at times tortured, lives. And to ultimately face the secret agonies which they all harbor: “Something lost. Or perhaps something never found. Sometimes both,” as the narrator says in The Devoted. The Devoted is particularly interesting, as it deals with the Italian front during World War II, something which I didn’t know much about. But both books, as with in Losing Julia, are about characters who must fashion a life and make sense of it post-war. And all of the characters must make sense of love, no matter the effects that war has on that love. They are all three love stories at heart and deal with the difficulties of love and loss in the midst of the tragedies of war. The characters’ present circumstances are front and center in the books—in The Distance from Normandy, a grandfather and his wayward grandson are thrown together and end up traveling together to Normandy where the grandfather fought. In a final effort to save his grandson from himself, Mead takes the teenager on a journey to the beaches, bunkers, and cemeteries of Normandy, where both of them confront the secrets they have been trying to forget. The relationship that develops between the two is heartwarming and revelatory. And in The Devoted World War II looms in the background of a present plot that involves the narrator returning to visit the dying Mike, who once rescued him from a burning car in which his parents died. The present circumstances are as intriguing as the layered past and the narrators of the books are constantly flipping back and forth between the two. “It is said that you can’t go back in life, but that’s not true,” the narrator tells us. “You can go back all right. You can go back as many times as you like. You just can’t change anything.”

A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Hull spent ten years as a correspondent at TIME, including three as the Jerusalem Bureau Chief. His reporting has ranged from the Gulf War and the Palestinian uprising to presidential politics and the troubled underside of American society. A cover story he wrote on youth violence won the Society of Professional Journalists’ prestigious Sigma Delta Chi award for magazine journalism.


A father of two, Hull lives in Sausalito, California, where he is at work on his fourth novel. The Devoted was first published in 2012, and I, for one, am anxiously awaiting his next book.

Written by Candice Millard

“Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die.”
—Theodore Roosevelt

Extensively researched and exhaustive in detail, The River of Doubt tells the tale of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing journey down an uncharted tributary of the Amazon River in 1914. Though a true story, the book reads very much like a novel in its narrative progress, power, and detail, as well as the extent to which we readers sympathize with the plights of the memorable characters who accompanied Roosevelt on the “the expedition of inhuman proportions”: Brazilian explorer and the expedition’s co-commander, Candido Rondon, George Cherrie the naturalist, Joao Lyra, the surveyor, Kermit, Roosevelt’s son, several Brazilian camaradas, and the fiery, audacious, adventure-seeking Roosevelt himself—all of whom struggled against all odds to make it from the headwaters of the River of Doubt a thousand miles down to where the river met the Aripuana River. The exploration of the unknown river was a cause the men felt worthy of dying for.

In a no-nonsense direct prose style, Candice Millard re-creates the devastating journey during which the men were besieged by poisonous insects and snakes—masters of disguise in the jungle—as well as hostile Indians, who had not yet had any contact with the outside world, treacherous white water rapids and whirlpools, near-starvation and disease, relentless rain, drowning, murder, and the rainforest itself, which Millard describes as “the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet.” These men risked their lives in the name of scientific exploration and discovery. Roosevelt, with his larger-than-life personality, was drawn like a magnet to punishing tests of endurance and danger. Initially, the trip became a way for Roosevelt to escape his humiliating defeat in the Presidential campaign of 1912. But it soon became a shared struggle for survival where the greatest enemy of all was the jungle itself. This is an amazing account of an ultimate test of human endurance.

Written by Jerzy Kosiński

Talk about hard to read. This was my second attempt to wade through this grisly novel. The first time, I was so shell-shocked by some of the scenes that I had to put it down. Second time through, though, I gritted my teeth and read on. What awaited me was a novel of an extraordinary Bosch-like vision where excessive brutalities and senseless rapes and killings are the norm. Kosiński’s story follows a dark-haired, olive-skinned boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, as he wanders alone from one village to another, sometimes hounded and tortured, only rarely sheltered and cared for by peasants of the land who look nothing like the boy. Light skinned and fair haired, the peasants are highly-superstitious and untrusting of the “gypsy vampire,” simply because he looks so different from themselves. Once believed to be autobiographical, it later became known that Kosińksi spent the war years with his parents. Witness to extraordinary atrocities, the boy in the novel, while adapting to his grim circumstances, is able to maintain a sense of dignity and individualism. “I made a promise to myself to remember everything I saw,” the boy says to himself. The boy also becomes a victim of the peasants’ cruelty and endures unspeakable tortures, which confuse him as to his own self-worth: “I stopped blaming others; the fault was mine alone, I thought.” At another point he refers to himself as a “small, black flea.” Even so, he maintains a remarkable resiliency, and this incredibly excruciating book becomes a testament to the human will and its determination to survive.

Written by Colson Whitehead

This book is hard to read, as it tells the story of two young boys who are sent to a terrifying reform school that is based on a real school that operated in Florida for over a hundred years. The school purports to instill “physical, intellectual, and moral training,” but in reality uses brutal tactics to keep the boys in line, including ruthless beatings, whippings, sexual assaults, solitary confinements, and “disappearances.”  The narrator says of the young boy Elwood’s time in solitary confinement at Nickel: “The worst thing that ever happened to Elwood happened every day: He woke in that room.”

Despite the grisly environment of the school and what happens to him there, Elwood remains hopeful, guided by Martin Luther King’s principles and words. He believes “There are people who trick you and deliver emptiness with a smile, while others rob you of your self-respect. You need to remember who you are.” Elwood is a responsible youth who gets caught up innocently with a bad egg and is sent to The Nickel Academy where he must learn to survive the sick tactics of a sadistic staff.

The book is beautifully written with surprising turns of figurative language (“Ishmael was a man of secret menace who stored up menace like a battery,” and “The record went around and around, like an argument that always returned to its unassailable premise”). And the friendships that are instilled among the “brotherhood of broken boys” are unforgettable, principally between the two friends, idealistic Elwood and skeptical Turner, and the surprising twist of fate toward which they hurtle in this gruesome page-turner. 

Written by Graham Greene

This is a gorgeously-written classic, published first in 1951, that begins in media res: “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” Not just an account of the end of an affair, but the beginnings of faith, as well. This is a stunning book that chronicles the obsessions, jealousies, doubts and budding belief in a God during World War II, between three central characters: writer, Maurice Bendrix, Sarah Miles, and her husband, civil servant Henry Miles. Graham Greene’s own affair with Catherine Watson formed the basis for The End of the Affair. The novel was chosen by Robert McCrum for his list of the 100 greatest novels in English.

The End of the Affair is a painfully-moving novel as it follows the lovers’ tortuous feelings, not only about their illicit love, but also about both characters’ growing beliefs in a Catholic God.

The main character Bendrix obsessively wrestles with demons throughout and admits that “This is a record of hate far more than of love.” It is a hate born out of love for Sarah, in his retrospective account of their adulterous affair during World War II, and how faith, too, can be born from that same hate/love conundrum. “If I could write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man: I would never have lost love.” Which he does, in the course of the novel: “I became aware that our love was doomed,” Henry says. “Love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour.” The narrator grapples with feelings of intense jealousy throughout, jealousy of Sarah’s relationship with her husband. “Jealousy,” he says, “exists only with desire.” And later he says, “Anybody who loves is jealous.” And after she leaves him he says, “How I hated her.”

Love ends in this novel when Sarah makes a pact with God after Bendrix is pinned under a door in an explosion during the Blitz. If he lives, then she will forsake her love for Bendrix. And she is true to her word. Bendrix lives, and Sarah leaves him. She continues to grapple with her choice, and her belief in a God. “This is the end,” she says. “But, dear God, what shall I do with this desire to love?” “Make me believe,” she entreats God. And later she says, “I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love.”

Midway through the novel, Sarah dies of an untreated lung infection, and Bendrix must learn to live without her, as his obsessions move from love/hate, to a tenuous belief in a God that he struggles to live with, but cannot live without. This is a book to be read, and read again.

Written by by Annie DeWitt

A unique coming of age novel that is both beautiful and disturbing, propelled as much by the lyricism of the language and imagery as by the story.

The novel takes place in a single summer on a dirt road in rural New England. It has at its heart a family coming apart at the seams, as witnessed by Jean, the 12-year-old daughter who escapes her sometimes brutal reality by wild escapes of her imagination.

The story IS the language and the unique places it goes:

“Perhaps , I thought, this is what is meant by witness. The act of stealing something private from someone, something they otherwise would never have released into the world.”

“Father took the roads slowly on the way home. We cranked down the windows and drove by all the people in their houses where the lights fell down at the end of the day. I let my arm out to catch the breeze. I thought about what it takes for a family to fall out of love with each other. Who knew how long this would keep? Our four bodies in this bucket of tin cruising the back roads of some town we only half recognized in the shadows. The rain was loud in the branches. Everyone had gone to bed except for the dogs.”

It is a beautiful piece that begs to be re-read, as the writing is that good. The prose is meant to be savored, like an exquisite meal.

Isola, by Allegra Goodman

A survivor story at its best, Isola by Allegra Goodman is inspired by the true story of a 16th Century heroine, Marguerite de Roberval. Young heiress to a fortune, Marguerite is orphaned at an early age. Her guardian, a mean and volatile man, spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on a voyage to New France (Canada). While onboard, she falls in love with her guardian’s secretary. The guardian becomes so enraged that he abandons the two lovers on an unpopulated island with no hope of rescue. Marguerite must learn survival skills fast. As a reader I cared for this striking heroine who must learn to hunt and survive on next to nothing but her ingenuity. She must learn to live in a brutal environment and defend herself from polar bears. And she must dig down and discover a faith she never knew she had. Vogue critic says it best: “A new generation of survival story . . . an extraordinary book that reads like a thriller, written with the care of the most delicate psychological and historical fiction.”

I was totally engaged with Marguerite’s plight and was pulled along as a reader, eager to find out what happens next.

Sam, by Allegra Goodman

I couldn’t resist but dive into another of Allegra Goodman’s books. This one called Sam, which is a stunning portrait of a girl growing into teenhood and womanhood. It is a deceptively simple tale, told with extraordinary depth and sensitivity.

Sam adores her father but he isn’t around much, and ultimately dies of an overdose in the course of the novel. Sam’s mother, Courtney, struggles to make ends meet, while being a very possessive mother who is constantly nagging her children to do things right. Meanwhile, Sam has a passion for climbing things—fences, walls, buildings, whatever she can get her hands on. Her father introduces her to a climbing gym, where the world opens up for her in mysterious ways. She is determined to solve the various puzzles of climbing rocks and boulders, and never seems to give up. At one point she says to a fellow climber with whom she is developing a budding romance: “I don’t know anything, and I don’t believe in anything, but I keep going anyway.” I loved this simple, age-old tale and cared deeply about the protagonist and her path toward adulthood.

Written by Gail Honeyman

Quirky, filterless, literal, lovable: Eleanor Oliphant. I was captivated by her socially-awkward character and her very solitary existence as an office employee, living alone with her marguerita pizza and two bottles of vodka as her weekend splurge. As Gail Honeyman says about her book: “I realized that I wanted to tell a story about someone like this, or, rather, someone who’d ended up like this, living a small life. A lonely person, a slightly awkward person, and someone in whom loneliness and social awkwardness had become entwined and self-perpetuating. I wanted to tell the story of how this had happened to her, and of what happened to her next, and this became the story of Eleanor Oliphant.” Slowly other characters make their way into her life: Raymond, her fellow office worker who takes a friendly shine to her; Sammy, the man on the street who has an accident that Raymond and Eleanor help. The novel made me warm and it made me laugh. Over its course, we share in Eleanor’s transformational journey toward a fuller understanding of self and life. Over its course we learn that Eleanor has some very dark secrets from her troubled past that have made her who she is, but it isn’t until the final plot-twisting revelation that we see what Eleanor is truly made of. Three thumbs up.