Partisan's Daughter (de Bernieres)

Book Reviews
In A Partisan's Daughter, his urgent, spare new novel of romantic obsession, Louis de Bernieres, proficient at intricate historical narratives (Corelli's Mandolin, Birds Without Wings) shows himself an artist of the simpler story as well. Not that simple means easy. If prostitution, as so often is said, is the oldest profession, then writing about fallen women must be the oldest literary subject. To make that subject hit its mark requires a new spin.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times

A wise and moving novel, perfectly accomplished. It shines fresh light on the nature of love.... Like Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, A Partisan’s Daughter is a novel about missed opportunities and wrong paths taken, tracing the way in which one false move can alter the history of a life.... A glory.
Guardian (UK)

De Bernieres (Corelli's Mandolin) delivers an oddball love story of two spiritually displaced would-be lovers. During a dreary late 1970s London winter, stolid and discontented Chris is drawn to seedy and mysterious Roza, a Yugoslav emigree he initially believes is a prostitute. She isn't (though she claims to have been), and soon the two embark on an awkward friendship (Chris would like to imagine it as a romance) in which Roza spins her life's stories for her nondescript, erstwhile suitor. Roza, whose father supported Tito, moved to London for opportunity but instead found a school of hard knocks, and she's all too happy to dole out the lessons she learned to the slavering Chris. The questions of whether Roza will fall for Chris and whether Chris will leave his wife (he calls her "the Great White Loaf") carry the reader along, as the reliability of Chris and Roza, who trade off narration duties, is called into question-sometimes to less than ideal effect. The conclusion is crushing, and Chris's scorching regret burns brightly to the last line.
Publishers Weekly

De Bernières, whose sweeping epics took us to Turkey in Birds Without Wings and to Greece in Corelli's Mandolin, turns closer to home with a melancholy tale of midlife crisis set in 1970s London with occasional glimpses of Yugoslavia. Chris is a 40-year-old unhappily married salesman who mistakes Roza for a streetwalker and in his loneliness makes a fumbling attempt to hire her. Instead, he gives her a lift home, and she invites him to return to her ramshackle flat for coffee. He does repeatedly as Roza slowly relates her intricate and allegedly sordid life story as the daughter of a fervent Tito loyalist. A complex and codependent relationship develops as Chris is alternately appalled and thrilled by Roza's blunt, manipulative storytelling and Roza imagines a future as Chris's lover. Overall, this is a sad, quiet novel about missed opportunities owing to lack of honest communication. Although more introspective than de Bernières's other works, this latest novel is no less skillful. For all literary fiction collections.
Christine Perkins - Library Journal

The popular British author who seems to alternate ambitious blockbusters (Birds Without Wings, 2005, etc.) with wispy makeweight fictions (e.g., the wafer-thin Red Dog) tests his devoted readership's patience again. This time we're treated to a dual narrative shared by Chris, a middle-age English widower ostensibly mourning the death of his sexually unresponsive wife ("a Great White Loaf"), and the exotic girl, Roza, whom he impulsively picks up, mistaking her for a prostitute. Chris is Alan Bates, timidly hoping Anthony Quinn's ebullient Zorba the Greek will teach him to shed propriety and learn to dance (so to speak). Roza, who perhaps actually is the Bulgarian Serb that she intermittently claims to be, is a gifted liar, and the sexually stunning life force of Chris's wildest dreams. They continue to meet, usually in the dilapidated apartment building Roza shares with several countercultural types (e.g., their very own BDU: Bob Dylan Upstairs). Roza regales the lovestruck Chris with fiery tales of her (mostly erotic) experiences, including an incestuous romp with her father, a devout follower of strongman Marshall Tito. Many of this painstakingly attenuated book's brief chapters are vehicles for canned information about the sufferings of Eastern European minority populations during times of political interest, and hence of inevitable interest. But everything eventually comes back to Roza's grandiose self-dramatizations, and it becomes impossible to take it, or her, seriously when we're frequently subjected to brain-dead, space-filling chapter titles ("Can You Fall in Love if You've Been Castrated?") and the kind of sonorous sentimentality that belongs in a zero-budget film noir (e.g.,"Even inside every damn fucked-up woman there's some sweet little girl"). A malodorous turkey. Corelli's Mandolin it ain't.
Kirkus Reviews