The Martyrs, the Lovers - by Catherine Gammon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Catherine Gammon's The Martyrs, The Lovers, Jutta Carroll and her lover Lukas Grimm are found shot to death in their home. Was it a murder-suicide? Was it the work of their political enemies, or possibly someone close to them? From WWII, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and reunification, The Martyrs, The Lovers is a novel wrought with the best of mystery, historical, and metafiction. Gammon, wielding prose like a surgical scalpel, peels back the layers of history to explore the forces and motivations--external and psychological--that drive politics, passion, and activism, as well as the counterforces that threaten their progress. By probing the all of the possible motives behind Jutta and Lukas's deaths, Gammons tells a tale of individual roles in world politics, considers the role of Western narrative structures, how and why we tell the stories that endure, and the (im)possibility of Truth.

Loosely based on the life and death of the activist and founder of the German Green Party, Petra Kelly, and her partner Gerd Bastien, The Martyrs, The Lovers calls attention to the perennial challenges that informed the lives and deaths of these activists; to environment, to peace, to justice, and to feminism, which, if anything, are more prevalent than ever today.

Review Quotes

"Here is a fiction whose ingredients comprise both fiction and fact, although you wouldn't call it historical fiction, even though it enfolds within the context of history; if it were bread, its yeast is fiction: it would not rise without the freedom and mystery that fiction offers the writer, the power to invent, to imagine, to invest oneself into the act of finding form and matter, even as the matter itself here is informed by fact, by the historical fact.

At times, the reader tends to want to know which is which, oddly part of the charm, and one must say that there's a good argument for the writer to have made this choice." - Geri Lipschultz, in a review for Compulsive Reader

Read this book and be seduced by Catherine Gammon's stunning and complex political mystery of a martyr bearing witness in a dangerous world. Against a backdrop of America's and Germany's brutal histories, her lyrical yet frightening--then haunted and intimate--language crawls into the psyche of her characters. Gammon is an author whose books you can trust to shock and seduce. Brava for a new book--for our times.

- Margo Berdeshevsky, author of It Is Still Beautiful to Hear the Heart Beat, Beautiful Soon Enough, and Kneel Said the Night.

Catherine Gammon's The Martyrs, The Lovers offers readerS Gammon's characteristically precise, beautiful prose, but there is also a thrilling new uncanniness here. With The Martyrs, The Lovers, Gammon renders humane truth out of fiction based in fact. A Sebaldian pleasure, perhaps related to Maylis de Kerangal's practice of "weav[ing] the documentary as a poem" in its comfort with unknowableness, and without a doubt a thoroughly captivating story of the cruelties of ambition disappointed.

- Gabriel Blackwell, author of Doom Town and CORRECTION

Praise for THE GUNMAN AND THE CARNIVAL:

"These stories portray the suffering caused by desire without censure or sentimentality, in a way that might be Zen detachment or might simply be called wisdom." - Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"In The Gunman and the Carnival, Catherine Gammon mirrors the brightly fractured nature of our lives at the sharp edge of this American moment. Her characters are recognizable in their striving for human connection in our time of despair and isolation--and in their struggle for footing upon a sinking landscape. Stylistically limber and by turns meditative, restless, and moving, these stories bravely attempt to channel what it means to be alive in this world now, and now, and now." - Lauren Acampora, The Hundred Waters

"Here are a handful of dreams crumbled to ash. Actors on the cusp of stardom, who instead of making it, find themselves playing dead bodies and waiting tables. A recovering alcoholic savoring a sense of stability, who gifts herself a birthday walk on the beach only to find a body washed up at her feet. A man and woman who fall easily in love, and then, just as easily, into mutual resentment. What does a person do when their life fails to meet their expectations, when their hopes wilt before they fully bloom? Catherine Gammon's The Gunman and The Carnival is a collection full of strikingly familiar disappointments and betrayals woven through with an appreciation for moments of beauty amongst the daily degradations of contemporary life. Told with precision and honesty, these stories are richly nuanced explorations of desire, regret, hurt, and hard-earned acceptance." - Jenny Irish, I Am Faithful and Lupine

"Gammon sharply observes her characters, loves them for their flaws and their hopes, and moves them through worlds defamiliarized by her punchy, powerful prose. Reading The Gunman and the Carnival made me revel in the joy and intensity of what a story can show us." - Gwen Kirby, Shit Cassandra Saw

About the Author

Catherine Gammon is most recently the author of the story collection The Gunman and the Carnival (Baobab Press, 2024). Her fiction has appeared in literary magazines for many years, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, New England Review, the Cincinnati Review, and the Missouri Review, among them. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as from colonies including the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and Djerassi. She lives in Pittsburgh, with a garden and a cat.