The Pretender
Jan 2016 · Random House
Ebook
288
Pages
family_home
Eligible
info
reportRatings and reviews aren’t verified Learn More
About this ebook
Berlin 1920. A young woman throws herself from a bridge into the Landwehr Canal, intent on suicide. But she is saved. She refuses to give any clue to her identity. She is literally a nobody. After two years of silence, she claims to be Anastasia, the fourth daughter of the Tsar of Russia. For over sixty years she lives with the firm conviction that she is, indeed, a grand duchess. It is only after her death in 1984 that DNA tests establish that the woman could not have been a Romanov. Who, then, was this mysterious woman, who lived a lie and convinced so many others of her fictional identity? And what of her own identity that she drowned that winter's night in Berlin?
In The Pretender, Mary Morrissy writes the prequel to the Anastasia myth. She creates a fictional history for Franziska Schanzkowska, the Polish factory worker who so successfully donned the mantle of the doomed princess. From the few facts that are known, Morrissy fashions the biography of a nobody - an impoverished Polish childhood, an adolescence set against the First World war and the ruinous humiliation of Germany in defeat, a young adulthood blighted by violence, trauma and loss. The Pretender is a nesting doll of a book. Morrissy unspools the multiple intricacies of female identity and explores the strategies that women employ to survive in a calamitous world. Was Franziska Schanzkowska a fraud? Was she de
In The Pretender, Mary Morrissy writes the prequel to the Anastasia myth. She creates a fictional history for Franziska Schanzkowska, the Polish factory worker who so successfully donned the mantle of the doomed princess. From the few facts that are known, Morrissy fashions the biography of a nobody - an impoverished Polish childhood, an adolescence set against the First World war and the ruinous humiliation of Germany in defeat, a young adulthood blighted by violence, trauma and loss. The Pretender is a nesting doll of a book. Morrissy unspools the multiple intricacies of female identity and explores the strategies that women employ to survive in a calamitous world. Was Franziska Schanzkowska a fraud? Was she de
About the author
Mary Morrissy has published three novels – Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey – and a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye (1993). She has won a Hennessy Award and a Lannan Literary Foundation Award and currently teaches at University College Cork.
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
