The River Midnight - Hardcover

This stunning debut from a major new talent "brings to mind such diverse writers as Isabel Allende, E. L. Doctorow, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, though Ms. Nattel's sensibility is uniquely hers" (Julie Salamon). Combining prodigious research and a fevered imagination, The River Midnight brilliantly brings to life all the things that books about the shtetl have traditionally left out -- women's lives and women's prayers, sex, crime, the intimate details of everyday life.

Myth meets history in Blaszka, a fictional village northwest of Warsaw, where angels and demons walk in the fin de siècle shadows, enticing the people of Blaszka to face their deepest wishes and fears. Listen. You can hear the excitement in the village square, the flimsy stalls piled high with everything, and in the center Misha the midwife laughing. She is a big, free, independent spirit in a world determined by strict rules -- men separated from women, meat from dairy, shabbes from everyday. When Misha was a girl she danced in the woods with her friends, the four vilda hayas, the "wild creatures" as they were known. But now the women have grown apart, divided by geography, by the pain of one's infertility next to the others' fecundity, and by love's demands.

The River Midnight is the incredibly engrossing and moving story of what happens when the town midwife becomes pregnant. Misha, the keeper of village secrets, will reveal to no one the biggest secret of all: the identity of the father to her unborn child. Do the men and women of Blaszka abandon Misha, who is the wayward heart of the village? Or do they come together and keep God waiting for their prayers?

This novel explores the tension between men and women, and celebrates the wordless and kinetic bond of friendship.