Books
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days is a fusion of biography, espionage thriller, and scholarly detective story about Mildred Harnack, an American graduate student who became a leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany during Hitler’s regime.
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
Winner, PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Winner, National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
Winner, The Chautauqua Prize
A New York Times Notable Book
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A New York Times Book Review Critics’ Top Book of the Year
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year
A TIME Magazine Must-Read Book of the Year
The Economist’s Best Book of the Year
A New York Post Best Book of the Yeare
An Oprah Daily Best New Book of August
A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week
A New York Public Library Book of the Week
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year
A Barnes & Noble Best History Book of the Year
A Barnes & Noble Best Audiobook of the Year
"Donner's story reads with the speed of a thriller, the depth of a novel, and the urgency of an essay, like some deeply compelling blend of Alan Furst and W.G. Sebald." – JAMES WOOD
“A stunning literary achievement.” – KAI BIRD, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography
“Astonishing…wilder and more expansive than a standard-issue biography….[an] extraordinarily intimate book… Donner is Harnack’s great-great-niece, so this is a family history too. It is also a story of code names and dead drops, a real-life thriller with a cruel ending — not to mention an account of Hitler’s ascent from attention-seeking buffoon to genocidal Führer….Donner’s decision to narrate events in the present tense [is] an effective device for conveying what it felt like in real time to experience the tightening vise of the Nazi regime.” – Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“A tour de force of investigation… The story unfolds in fragments… but as the pieces cohere, the couple’s story becomes gripping… The abiding impression is of virtuous, extraordinarily brave people caught up in tragic horror.”–The Economist
“It’s against a tense backdrop of political terror that we recognise Mildred’s extraordinary bravery. This is a superb, sure-footed work of historical detection conceived with a powerful intelligence.” – The Sunday Times (UK)
“This is a powerful book. A nonfiction narrative with the pace of a political thriller, it’s imbued with suspense and dread.” – The Wall Street Journal
“Donner quotes passages from her sources at length, letting the reader dwell on facts rather than galloping through them. She does this stylishly, sometimes presenting events in chronological lists or highlighting fragments from her research as stand-alone text. The archival quality of the book, its enumeration and cataloging of sources, is both surprising for a biography — too rarely the site of literary innovation — and affecting.” – Madeleine Schwartz, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
“Rebecca Donner’s passionate, page-turning book, “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days”...melds history and biography. She brings forensic and literary skills — along with access to family papers and a key witness — to a story at once deeply personal and broadly inspiring” – The Boston Globe
“All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days sets the remarkable story of resistance fighter Mildred Harnack against the backdrop of daily life in Germany as Hitler tightened his grip. Epic in sweep, written with a novelist’s attention to detail and a historian’s perspective on social and political forces, this book opens up new possibilities for biography.” – RUTH FRANKLIN, winner of the NBCC Award for Biography, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
“How can it happen that a constitution, a free press, and a democracy be demolished — all within six months? This powerfully written story of Mildred Harnack, resistance fighter against Hitler, tells step by step the way the German republic fell to the Nazis. Read All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, and be warned.”– MAXINE HONG KINGSTON, winner of the National Book Award, author of The Woman Warrior
“Combining meticulous scholarship and sparkling narrative brio, Rebecca Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days brings to life for the first time the central role played by Mildred Harnack in Germany’s homegrown opposition to Nazi rule. Donner’s portrait of the cruelly oppressive system against which Harnack and her circle fought serves to remind us of what can happen when, amidst economic insecurity and anguish over dislocating socio-cultural change, a highly civilized nation embraces demagoguery over democracy.” – DAVID CLAY LARGE, author of Berlin
“A gorgeous collage of history and family lore, a revelatory window onto a Götterdämmerung that transformed the world forever.” – Oprah Daily, named a Best New Book of August
“Donner’s meticulous research and novelist’s sensibility make for a riveting biography of a remarkable and brave woman.” – Library Journal
“Despite its ostensibly forbidding subject matter this is a thrilling and inspiring book...a treasure trove for lovers of biography, new writing and the history of the Third Reich.” – The Scotsman (UK)
“Donner has clearly worked hard in East German, Soviet, and recently released American archives to tell an impressive story.” – Kirkus Reviews
"[A] stunning biography...Donner’s research is impeccable, and her fluid prose and vivid character sketches keep the pages turning.”– Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Sunset Terrace
Sunset Terrace is a novel about a community of latch-key kids and their single mothers in 1980s LA.
"Donner's writing is nothing short of gorgeous, alive to the intricate hostilities between girls and the tangled alliances among women. The compassion she summons for the desperately sad children in this book is nearly crushing in its intensity. This is a remarkable debut." —Baltimore Sun
"A family puts down roots in a hardscrabble Southern California apartment complex in this colorful, wonderfully realized first novel…Donner's finely observed portraits of the Sunset Terrace denizens show a rare gift, perfectly capturing both the era and milieu." —Publisher's Weekly
"Rebecca Donner has captured with painful accuracy the way that longing and love between girls can get tangled until it becomes an impossible knot. This is a gripping story, told with compassion, humor, and a clarity of vision that marks the debut of a writer to watch." —DANI SHAPIRO, author of Inheritance
"A migratory mother flirts with stability in first-timer Donner's strongly realized novel of place. Elaine is the widow behind the wheel, forever tucking daughters Hannah and Daisy into her rattletrap Datsun, their drowsy eyes opening on 11 seedy homes in just three years. Now, in the summer of 1983, the girls find themselves in LA, outside the harshly misnamed Sunset Terrace, a complex of six low-rent apartments colonized by single mothers—true “characters” all—and vivified by the children they’ve raised on cheese wieners and cherry soda. Nomads no more—so they hope—the family dares to put down its roots. Their obstacles are many. Elaine, a college-educated short-order cook, struggles to find work (one job has her squeezing whipped cream into endless pastry swans) and to make peace with the ghost of her husband, a cellist whose slow slide into dementia ended in suicide. The brooding Hannah, meanwhile, favors her pet turtle over her mother and little sister. But all changes with the introduction of Bridget, a sassy, scabby nine-year-old who, when she’s not shoplifting, chants lewd ditties from her perch atop a chain-link fence…Sunset Terrace approaches the snug communality of another shabby setting, that of the houseboat dwellers in Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, adhering to the memory with a shrieking of gulls and a dappling of sun on cinderblock." —Kirkus Reviews
"Literate fiction dealing with the inner lives of children presents a challenge for both writer and reader. But Donner does her young characters the service of taking them seriously, investing them with self-awareness and the capacity for complex motivations, while writing with an asperity that keeps her clear of the maudlin and the trite." —Gulf Coast Review
Burnout
Burnout is a graphic novel about ecoterrorism in the Pacific Northwest.
"The enormously talented Donner is unafraid of taking risks with Burnout, and it pays off, with a cautionary, edgy and unputdownable story." — Oakland Tribune
"Just as she did in her excellent debut [Sunset Terrace], Donner crafts a hauntingly evocative story in Burnout." — Book Reporter
"While the message of Burnout isn't a happy-go-lucky one, it is honest. For that and much more, it's a story that lingers in the mind, like the sharp pain of a burn." — ComicMix
ON THE ROCKS: THE KGB BAR FICTION ANTHOLOGY
On the Rocks is an anthology of stories edited by Rebecca Donner when she was Literary Director of the celebrated KGB Bar Fiction Series in New York.
"White lightning in printed form . . . Enjoyable, terrifying, addictive: the kind of anthology readers deserve."—Kirkus Reviews
"[Donner], the series' literary director, has selected 20 stories from writers who have read at KGB and whose work exemplifies its spirit as "a place where risk is celebrated and boundaries are transcended."—Library Journal
"A tiny East Village tenement room that used to be a meeting place for Ukrainian socialists, KGB Bar launched a reading series in 1994 that has become a beloved fixture of the New York literary scene. This third anthology (after KGB Bar Reader and the KGB Bar Book of Poems) focuses exclusively on fiction. Edited by Donner, literary director of the KGB Sunday Fiction Series, it features both veterans and ingenues...United only by their uniformly high level of originality and artistry, these innovative stories make for a top-flight anthology, a treat for anyone who wants to sample the best in contemporary fiction."—Publishers Weekly