Simone in Pieces
A WWII refugee’s search to recover—and reconnect with—her past.
Readers first meet Simone Lerrante, a Belgian war orphan, as a child refugee in Sussex, England, her memory damaged by trauma. The novel offers a kaleidoscopic vision of Simone’s fractured life and piecemeal understanding of self across multiple points of view. Following her from Cambridge to New York City and across the United States—through a disastrous marriage, thwarted desire, and the purgatory of academic backwaters—the novel charts Simone’s unexpected reconnection with her past, which provides both autonomy and inspiration for her future.
Dazzling New Historical Fiction…
The New York Times
The heroine of Burroway’s SIMONE IN PIECES is a World War II orphan who can’t remember much of what happened before she was rescued from a Flemish beach and spirited across the Channel to England. In a series of slyly eloquent chapters that follow Simone Lerrante from childhood into her 60s, we see her through the refracting context of the people she meets…
Eventually, a crucial piece of her past is retrieved and the blurred images of her long-dead Belgian parents begin to take on sharper definition. In her acknowledgments, Burroway explains her narrative strategy, reminding us that we build ourselves “by will and happenstance” through our encounters with others. For Simone, self-recognition — and self-acceptance — may only come when she can permit herself to return to the streets of Liège.
Incredibly prolific, multigenre author Burroway is possibly best known for her textbook, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, first published in 1982 and still widely in use. The current novel might also be thought of as a guide to writing fiction, putting on display a wide array of techniques for portraying a character and unfolding a story.
Kirkus
As Simone creates collages from fragments of photographs, this novel delivers similar aesthetic surprise and satisfaction.
Novelist and writing instructor Burroway (Writing Fiction) offers a well-crafted tale of a war orphan’s decades-spanning journey of self-discovery. Simone Lerrante arrives in England during WWII, unable to remember anything about her parents or her previous life in Belgium…Burroway alternates Simone’s narration with evocative snippets from other characters’ points of view, such as Simone’s unnamed rescuer, who remembers the smell of war as “a sourness like fireworks,” and Darla, who thinks back on how Simone photographed her and raved about one day becoming a movie star. Burroway gets plenty of mileage from her rootless protagonist’s life.
Publishers Weekly
An impressive range of characters share their various perceptions of Simone. The lone woman among the refugee boat crew recalls her as “gawky” and resolute. Darla, whose family hires teenage “Simmy” as domestic help, their shared love of movies and giddy same-sex experimentation. A Cambridge classmate finds Simone exasperating and alluring; years later, a faculty colleague describes her as a “cross between a perfectionist and a flower child.” These kaleidoscopic glimpses reflect Simone’s projected personae; as she matures beyond her steely adaptability, her own perspective centers the narrative more, providing more revelatory insights.
Foreword Reviews
The book’s scope is both wide-ranging and detailed, spanning wartime Europe and late-twentieth-century America.
Intense emotions and repressed memories alternate with wry humor: Simone describes herself as a “chopped and patched sort of person.” Elegant prose likens a Florida sky to the “luminous azure of old heraldry,” while deft interconnections link certain people and events with finesse, resulting in closure where relevant.
In the absorbing novel ,Simone in Pieces, a young refugee’s mutable identity diverts and sustains the course of her life.
A compelling story of love, loss, and the coincidences that make a life. . . . Readers will find themselves contemplating the trajectory of their own lives while following Simone on her long, winding road to a happy-ish ending.
Library Journal
If one of the novel’s conceits is that identity becomes intelligible by threading parts of the self into a cohesive story, the prose after Simone’s reawakening becomes increasingly lucid as her capacity to craft such a narrative grows. This final confirmation of Burroway’s command of characterization sets the stage for Simone to live out the last years of her life inside a story that is at once both satisfying and believable.
Necessary Fiction
Brilliant in conception and dazzlingly adept in its technical execution, Simone in
Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Pieces proves once again that Burroway is a national treasure. She is at the height of her prodigious powers, exploring the great and enduring theme of literary art: the yearning for a self, for an identity, for a place in the universe. This is a must read.
If there were such a thing as a cubist novel, Simone in Pieces would define the genre. Every chapter captures the woman at its center from a different angle, each a dazzling surprise. Burroway has found a brilliant way to portray a woman in search of herself and her dire history, lost and found many times over.
Rosellen Brown, author of The Lake on Fire