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  • Published: 19 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787335424
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $49.99

The Scrapbook





A story of a consuming first love haunted by European history and family memory, and inspired by real events

A debut novel about a life-changing romance in the long shadow of European history, inspired by the author's real discovery.

'A singular portrait of intoxicating young love' AUBE REY LESCURE

'You wouldn't be able to put it down' SAMANTHA ROSE HILL

For years after I tried to tell myself that what happened between us was hardly worth remembering.

Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she meets Christoph, a German student visiting campus. They only spend a week together – discussing art, ideas and history – but it is long enough for Anna to fall desperately in love. Anna begins to visit Christoph in Germany. As she tries to understand the young, elegant man who fascinates her, he reveals his country to her.

Germany is still reckoning with the Holocaust and its pretty new squares and grand facades belie its recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains vague about the part his own grandparents played. Anna’s grandfather, meanwhile, was an American GI who took photos of the end of the war, photos that capture its horror, preserved in a scrapbook only Anna has seen.

Anna wants to believe in Christoph and the future he promises her but as their relationship becomes increasingly unsettling, she must face up to everything she has been unwilling to see, and everything Christoph has chosen to ignore.

'An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love' Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots

'Heather Clark writes with a rare empathy' Times Literary Supplement

  • Published: 19 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787335424
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $49.99

About the author

Heather Clark

Heather Clark earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in English from Oxford University. She is the author of two award-winning books on post-war poetry, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972. She divides her time between Chappaqua, New York, and Yorkshire, England, where she is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield.

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Praise for The Scrapbook

'A first-class biography . . . Each chapter reads with the ease of a novel . . . I couldn't put it down'

The Times, praise for Red Comet

'Surely the final, the definitive, biography of Sylvia Plath'

Ali Smith, praise for Red Comet

'One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read'

Glennon Doyle, praise for Red Comet
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