THE HYMN OF THE HARVEST
STATUS: QUERYING AGENTS & PRESSES
"You may be thinking that reading this book is a good idea. You're wrong... I don't owe you any kind of explanation. Instead, what I do owe you, as part of my due diligence as collector-turned-editor-turned jailor, is this: A warning."
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A novel beginning with a warning, named after a hymn from a nation that no longer exists. A search for a lost homeland spread across generations. Wishes and fears and hopes clashing as the Berlin Wall falls and what was once secret comes to light.
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Emilia Ousten is a historian in East Germany, a profession requiring no small amount of spin-doctoring. When the Berlin Wall suddenly falls, she is contacted by the mother who abandoned her to flee over the Wall into the West. Her mother, Helmina Heim, invites her, by way of coded letters, to aid her search for the Walderreich, the Realm of the Woods, a lost Alpine nation where the Heim family descends from. ​
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The search has defined much of Helmina's life and brought her into contact and covenant with all manner of people: The honorable, the cynical, the haunted, the ignorant. Now Emilia is faced with the chance to follow in her mother's footsteps and, hopefully, find her at the end of the road where she can learn her own answers...
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The Hymn of the Harvest is an epistolary-historical novel spanning hundreds of years of history. Part investigation, part meditation on loneliness and borders and trespassings, part voyeurism, part living and imagined memory. Drawing from multimodal and epistolary novels such as Danielewski's
House of Leaves, Schumacher's Dear Committee Members, and Nabokov's Pale Fire, The Hymn of the Harvest brings an eclectic cast of truth-seekers into a search for clarity in times of chaos.
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A WORLD OF WALLS
"If this is what revolution feels like, I see the appeal."
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As the Berlin Wall falls and the Cold War reaches it conclusion, Emilia finds herself in a world still defined by lies, secrets, and walls.
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Her allies in the search for the Walderreich and the exposure of the Stasi must often hide their knowledge in plain sight. It falls to Emilia, and the archives at her disposal, to riddle the wheat out from the chaff.
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Unfortunately, East Germany has, for many years, been defined by secret-keeping. Emilia must sometimes intuit what she cannot read, assume when she cannot find, and pull on threads often cut along their lengths. Such adventurism is as exciting as it is dangerous. Wishful thinking can arise in the blank spaces between pages...
THE REALM OF THE WOODS
"Today, the Hymn of the Harvest ended. Old Solider will be the last thing to burn, if he burns at all. I am standing under the alien trees of another country, collecting flakes of ash on my shoulders like snow..."
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The Walderreich was never a large nation, never a powerful nation. But it was proud of its culture, its resilience, and its history surviving unbroken through generations of European conflict. And, though it all, the Walderreich holds to its dear Hymn of the Harvest like a bouy in a storm.
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Indeed, all that could bring such an illustrious nation to its end is the Walderreich itself. As Emilia searches through the scraps of the past for clear paths to follow, she quickly learns that the Walderreich had long been a teetering house of cards, not so unlike the Germany she was born and raised in.
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The search for the Walderreich has unearthed dozens of lost voices, and each one that adds their voices to the growing chorus brings Emilia and her allies closer to the truth. Though, history is often written not by the winners but by the survivors...
A TAPESTRY OF FALSE DOCUMENTS
"Dieter sketched me. Didn't even notice he was doing it, like it was an unconscious urge of his. Took him only a few minutes. I asked to see it, but he said no way. You don't know somebody their own portrait, he said.
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During Emilia's search, she runs across a veritable tapestry of documents. From sketches to newspaper clippings to journal entries, to Stasi wiretaps, Emilia gathers it all until the mysterious Editor can compile the pieces into the novel it becomes.
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Those brave enough to delve into The Hymn of the Harvest will find the whirlwind of paper and ink that Emilia and many of her fellows had to contend with, the chaos that defined their search for home, belonging, and peace in a world blown off its axis...
