University Park author Monica Hesse returns to the World War II era for the third time in her latest novel.
Set in Poland and Germany just after the war, “They Went Left” is centered on an 18-year-old girl trying to rebuild her life after her family was killed in the Holocaust.
Hesse previously wrote about the era in “The Girl in the Blue Coat,” set in Holland in 1943, and “The War Outside,” set in Texas in 1945.
“I think I keep coming back to this era because every day, in every corner of the world, this war revealed the absolute best and the absolute worst of humanity,” she told the Hyattsville Wire. “You have neighborhoods where one person was rescuing Jewish families while their next door neighbor was turning Jews into the Nazis. Those are the stories I’m always interested in: when the world around you has gone mad, who do you become?”
Hesse relied on her prior research on the era and dug into the oral histories at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. She also used Google Maps to figure out which routes her main character would have taken while walking around Sosnowiec, Poland.
She was supposed to be traveling around the U.S. on a two-week book tour right now, but bookstore owners have had to get creative. Politics and Prose in D.C. is hosting a virtual event, while a bookstore in Nashville sent their entire stock to her home to sign.
Hesse, who also wrote the non-fiction “American Fire,” still regularly writes for the Washington Post on gender issues. She attributes her remarkable productivity to a writing motto borrowed from Nike: Just do it.
“Don’t wait for inspiration,” she said. “Don’t wait until you have the perfect sentence. Get words down on a page — they don’t have to be brilliant yet; that comes with revision. For now they just have to be done.”
As she rides out the coronavirus lockdown at home, Hesse says she misses breakfast at the Silver Diner or Vigilante Coffee, meeting up with friends at Maryland Meadworks or Town Center market, getting smoothies at Banana Blossom Bistro and working out at Bikram Yoga.
“I know that a lot of movies have been early-released on Amazon, but movie theaters as physical spaces, are my favorite places,” she said. “Once the Old Greenbelt Theater and the Regal in Hyattsville open up again, I’m going to eat so many tubs of popcorn.”
“They Went Left” is now available on Amazon and other online booksellers including Barnes & Noble where it’s been selected as this month’s YA Book Club Edition.
