MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO PRAGUE

Sixteen-year-old Natalia Faber is pulled out of her convent boarding school to serve as her idiosyncratic and narcissist mother Beatriz’s traveling companion. When their train to Prague is delayed by a flooded branch line, Natalia volunteers to watch the young son of Czech doctor Magdalena Schaefferová as she attends a sick passenger. Later arriving at a spa on the shore of Lake Hévíz in Hungary, the Fabers meet Miklós Andorján, a Hungarian count and journalist, and his on-again, off-again love interest, Zita Kuznetsova, whom Natalia recognizes as the occupants of a speeding blue car she had admired from the train. Not long after, the impulsive Beatriz takes off with Zita for the Dalmatian coast. Out of this inauspicious beginning, a romance between Natalia and Miklós eventually blossoms, and they marry, splitting their time between Berlin and a rural Hungarian estate. But World War II separates them when Miklós heads to Russia to report on the Eastern Front. Believing her husband’s promise that they would reunite in Prague in the spring of 1942, Natalia goes there to wait for him and meets Anna, the 13-year-old daughter of Dr. Schaefferová. Both get caught up in the brutality of the Nazi occupation. Like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, Windley’s ambitious novel, switching points of view among Natalia, Anna, and, briefly, Miklós, vividly captures the devastating losses that war inflicts on ordinary people. But in trying to cover so much history across three different countries, it also feels crammed with too many contrived coincidences and sketchily drawn people (a cast of characters to keep track of all these secondary players would have been helpful).

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