Skeletons at the Feast [Audio Cassette]

Chris Bohjalian (Author), Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Books On Tape (2008)
• ISBN-10: 1415955069
• ISBN-13: 978-1415955062
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (150 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,699,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Chris Bohjalian is the author of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers, The Night Strangers, Secrets of Eden, Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind, Before You Know Kindness, The Law of Similars, and Midwives.

His new novel, The Night Strangers, is a ghost story inspired by a door in his basement and Sully Sullenberger's successful ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River.

Secrets of Eden, his 2010 novel, will air as a Lifetime Television movie on January 28, 2012. It stars John Stamos and Anna Gunn.

Chris won the New England Book Award in 2002, and his novel, Midwives, was a number one New York Times bestseller, a selection of Oprah's Book Club, a Publishers Weekly "Best Book," and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery pick. His work has been translated into over 25 languages and twice before become movies ("Midwives" and "Past the Bleachers"). You can see some of the international covers on this web site.

He has written for a wide variety of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and has been a Sunday columnist for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since 1992. Chris graduated from Amherst College, and lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.

You can learn more about him here on the Q and A, as well as on Facebook . And, if you like, follow him on twitter as well.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting, June 8, 2008

By 

Theresa W (mi, usa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Skeletons at the Feast (Hardcover)

I am a huge fan of Christopher Bohjalian, I can't say enough good things about his novels. What I enjoy most is his ability to find unique and controversial topics to write about and explore. I was a little surprised to hear he was writing a book that was placed during WWII in Germany. I was leary to see if he could pull this off, to take a topic that has been written about over and over and movies have been made- could he do something new? The answer is yes.

This isn't the average holocaust novel, featuring mainly Jews in a concentration camp. This book takes a look at how this horrific time in Germany affected many different people. The main characters are a Prussian family who is on the run to find security in another country- a wealthy family who never thought the war would touch them and who did not believe in the autrocities that they were told were going on. Also on the run with them is a Scottish POW, which gives us the perspective of how this war affected those who weren't even citizens of Germany and yet they gave their lives. Lastly there is Uri who is a Jew who escaped from a concentration camp, and two women who did not escape a prison camp, where we see that sickening side of the war. I really loved how these characters were all sort of thrown together and we saw all of these different perspectives.

The tale is haunting, but what else can you say about the holocaust? More than the holocaust, this novel explores the darkside of human nature, but also the part in all of us that is a survivalist and preservere's. I read Cormack McCarthy's novel The Road last year and as I was reading this book I just couldn't stop thinking about the similarities. Maybe this book will reach those heights, it surely deserves it, as does Bohjalian's talents.

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chris Bohjalian's Masterpiece, May 7, 2008

By 

Marvin Minkler "North Star Monthly" (St. Johnsbury, VT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Skeletons at the Feast (Hardcover)

Chris Bohjalian has written his finest novel to date, set against the brutal, waning days of World War II in Eastern Germany. The Soviet Army is advancing through Poland, and ahead of it a small, thrown-together group of refugees, begin a long, arduous trek ahead of the Russians, trugging across the devastation of the smoldering Third Reich. Concentration camps, death marches, brutal Nazis, POWs, broken families, rampaging Russian soldiers, and terrified refugees. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all humbled by the bitter January cold. Yet, in the midst of this gutwrenching carnage, the author writes of new-found love, tender family moments, bonding friendships, resiliency, and hope. Above all - hope. Skeletons at the Feast, is Bohjalian's masterpiece. The power of the narrative will stay with the reader long after this book is put on the shelf. Inspired by an actual World War II diary the author read, it will stand as one of the best novels ever written about one of the most brutal periods in history.

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Couldn't Put it Down, May 13, 2008

By 

Mary Lins (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Skeletons at the Feast (Hardcover)

Chris Bohjalian's latest novel, "Skeletons at the Feast" might be his best novel to date, and it can't be a coincidence that it comes out just as Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary.

I couldn't turn the pages quickly enough in this absorbing tale of flight during the end of WWII. Each character becomes important to the reader and each of their fates matter to us. Mr. Bohjalian presents the stories of a variety of players, and through them we see the horrors of war, as well as the horrors of denial; there are Germans, Jews, women from a concentration camp, a Scottish POW, and an innocent child. Questions that these characters would have asked themselves and each other: "How did this happen?" "What were they thinking?" "Why does the world hate us so much?" and "Where did all those Jewish and Polish people we used to know go to?" are asked and answered in this gripping and suspenseful tale.

(Note to the editor: the use of em dashes to set apart long parenthetical clauses was very distracting and interrupted the flow of the narrative. Semi-colons or parentheses would have served better, in my opinion. If this is a specific style of Mr. Bohjalian's I never noticed it being so distracting before.)