Book of forbidden words A novel

Inspired by two sixteenth-century women, one a real-life powerhouse in Paris' printing industry, the other a fictional orphan girl who is the ward of Sir Thomas More, Fein (The London Bookshop Affair, 2024) boldly illustrates how history uncannily repeats itself. As Britain grows more repressive under King Henry VIII's tyranny, Lysbette is motivated by More's Utopia to write a female-centric representation of a similarly idyllic world. Finding a printer brave enough to produce it seems impossible until Lysbette meets Charlotte Guillard, a successful, if notorious, Parisian publisher. But Lysbette is murdered before the work can be created, so Guillard honors her sacrifice by rewriting and illustrating the narrative in code, hoping that someday the controversial manuscript can emerge in a more accepting society. Four hundred years later, in 1953, the book falls into the hands of Millie Bennett, a WWII codebreaker and classics scholar, who publishes her translation at the height of the communist Red Scare and becomes as persecuted as her predecessors. "The parallels," Millie muses, "are so glaringly obvious. Chillingly so." And therein lies Fein's engrossing thematic drive. The greater a society's need for tolerance, the more restrictive it becomes. Devotees of rich historical fiction and contemporary social discourse alike will be enthralled.

Fein's (The London Bookshop Affair) provocative story underlines the role of women in shaping society throughout time. In 1552, former nun Lysbette Angiers writes a treatise that imagines a world where equality and fairness allow all people to live in peace and prosperity. The men around Lysbette take exception to her ideas, calling them heretical, but she is uncowed and takes the manuscript to a printer in Paris to disseminate it widely. Charlotte Guillard agrees to print the book but is arrested by the Inquisition before she can start the presses. After she is miraculously released, Charlotte gathers a group of trusted women to encode Lysbette's manuscript and preserve her ideas for future generations to find. In 1952 New York City, a multilingual former codebreaker named Millie Bennett gets her hands on the encoded manuscript. After cracking the code, Millie publishes Lysbette's treatise as a serial in a popular women's magazine. This irritates the men in power during the United States' Red Scare. Millie is ultimately accused of disseminating communist propaganda and deported. But it's too late--millions of women have already read Lysbette's writing and are beginning to think about how they might make their world resemble the one she imagines. In an afterword to this historical novel, Fein reveals the sources upon which she loosely based her carefully constructed characters. VERDICT Fein thoughtfully conveys the slow progress toward women's equality over several centuries.--Joanna Burkhardt