PUBLISHED

Mid Air: Two Novellas. Fate is explored in the fall and rise of two twentieth-century American families.

Victoria Shorr’s remarkable gift for depicting the inner lives of complex characters shines in two powerful explorations of family, ambition, class, and status.

In “Great Uncle Edward,” a family gathers for dinner. At ninety-three, Great Uncle Edward commands the table in his three-piece suit; Cousin Russell attended both Harvard and Yale but is now reduced to selling off the family books; sisters Betty and Molly are caught between ghosts of a storied past and creeping destitution. These lives are signposts along the downward spiral of an old aristocracy. “Cleveland Auto Wrecking” introduces Sam White, an immigrant from eastern Europe. He cannot read but has a gift for math and an instinct for the value of junk. We follow his clan through the Depression to the postwar boom in the West, where their fortunes soar, creating new tests of loyalty.

Taken together, these two novellas might be the reverse images of the American dream in the twentieth century. They ask to what degree, in the face of such powerful forces as love, death, and social constraints, do any of us have control over our own lives.
[Norton, May, 2022]

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The Plum Trees: A poignant tale about one woman’s quest to recover her family’s history, and a story of loss and survival during the Holocaust.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, an American woman stumbles upon a family letter, sent from Germany in 1945. The letter contains staggering news: her great-uncle Hermann, who was transported to Auschwitz with his wife and three daughters, might have escaped. Spurred by the discovery and gripped with questions, she sets out to unravel the truth. Most of her family are dead, so she scours oral testimonies, historical records, and her own fleeting memories. Moving from their happy home in Czechoslovakia to Hungary, where they were captured, to their internment at the concentration camps, The Plum Trees reconstructs in astonishing, poignant detail the lives of Hermann, his wife, and their daughters from the days before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia through the liberation of Auschwitz and the end of World War II. Inspired by the author’s family history, The Plum Trees is a powerful, intimate reckoning with the past.
[Norton, March, 2021]

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Midnight: Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Joan of Arc. Three stories we thought we knew, but we didn’t, not like we know them after we see them at midnight. This book takes each of these women as she faces her greatest challenge—a homeless Jane Austen. Joan of Arc at the stake. Mary Shelley in Italy, watching the water, wondering how she will face all the forces ranged against her if her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, doesn’t come back. Vastly different stories, but the moment is the same, the darkest one.
[Norton, March, 2019]

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Backlands: A Novel
Set in the sparse frontier settlements of northeastern Brazil—a dry, forbidding, and wild region the size of Texas, known locally as the Sertão—Backlands tells the true story of a group of nomadic outlaws who reigned over the area from about 1922 until 1938. Taking from the rich, admired—and feared—by the poor, they were led by the famously charismatic bandit Lampião. The gang maintained their influence by fighting off all the police and soldiers the region could muster.
[Norton, March, 2016]

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UPCOMING

Women in Love, set in NY in the 70s, among women seeking new ways of living.

The Blue Jaguar, a suicidal trip up the coast of California.

Don't Complain to the Maids, short stories of expatriate life in Brazil in the 80s.