The Martyrs, The Lovers
Advance praise for The Martyrs, The Lovers
“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 doubt a thoroughly captivating story of the cruelties of ambition disappointed.” — Gabriel Blackwell, author of Doom Town and CORRECTION
“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
From reviews…
“Written in hypnotic and densely layered prose, The Martyrs, The Lovers is an emotionally charged deconstruction of the layered character of Jutta Carroll. Just as Jutta is always using art, books, and historical figures to find comfort and reason, the novel attempts to strike the same resonant chords with readers. ‘Gandhi knew that the end was to be found in the means: there was no end, is no end, the means themselves are the end, the only end: the present, the ongoing present.’ Like Gandhi, Gammon isn’t concerned with endings but with ideas, especially the ones that resonate now.” —Robert English, Necessary Fiction
“Reading this book sent me to Petra Kelly’s story; I ransacked the Internet for information. But it is Gammon’s framing of the story that makes it even more haunting—the way she casts Jutta into the net of a very real history as well as the webs of the author’s own imagination. From this exhilarating exercise emerges a palimpsest, with Jutta’s story atop Petra Kelly’s, and a doubly powerful book. The Martyrs, the Lovers is deeply resonant for our day and age, as are the concerns of both the protagonist and the real politician and activist upon whom she is based.” —Geri Lipschultz, Ms. Magazine (The long form of this review appears at Compulsive Reader)
“Gammon’s thorough and nonjudgmental thematic examination of false martyrdom and silence concealing masked generational and personal trauma will haunt readers long after the novel is complete. … [W[hile these jumps through time and space blend fact and fiction, they also act as testaments to Gammon’s literary and stylistic precision. However, it is the smaller moments, tucked deep within, where true beauty and vulnerability radiate – we connect with Jutta and each other through continued plights for causes, but we cannot tout justice for all without simultaneously taking care of our own biases, vulnerabilities, and mental, physical, and emotional wellness.” —Tara Friedman, West Trade Review
Background on The Martyrs, The Lovers:
“When I first researched the life and work of Petra Kelly, I was preparing to write a book different from The Martyrs, The Lovers in every obvious way. An as-told-to biography, in collaboration with Petra, the book to come was meant to focus on her understanding of herself and her evolution as an environmental activist….” (read in full at Necessary Fiction’s Research Notes)
The Martyrs, The Lovers (2023)
Note: 55 Fathoms, the original publisher of The Martyrs, The Lovers, has closed its doors. Used and new copies of the book can still be ordered via Amazon at the link above (although there is some uncertainty about who is actually selling the “new” copies). A new print edition is anticipated from Baobab Press in 2026.