No One Is Here Except All of Us, Ramona Ausubel‘s debut novel, is a sweeping and lyrical retelling of events during World War II. A New York Times Editor’s Choice, winner of both the PEN USA Fiction Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, it was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Huffington Post, was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was nominated for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award.
No One Is Here Except All of Us, Ramona Ausubel‘s debut novel, is a sweeping and lyrical retelling of events during World War II. A New York Times Editor’s Choice, winner of both the PEN USA Fiction Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, it was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Huffington Post, was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was nominated for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. The novel settles on a small village nestled in a valley, next to a river, somewhere in Europe. After discovering a nude stranger washed up on the banks of their river, the village fights to save itself from the war through the sheer force of their imaginations.
Considering Ausubel’s background in poetry, it’s no wonder that No One Is Here Except All of Us contains as many achingly beautiful passages as it does. The storytelling hearkens to a past era of florid sentences, and prose so verbose it rolls off the page. Ausubel is a thorough and descriptive storyteller, and engulfs the reader with her vivid and sensational depictions.
No One Is Here Except All of Us rises and falls in tides of sadness and hope. As the village struggles to shield itself from the approaching horrors of Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, the reader is left with a sense of awe at the grandeur and horror of it all. Ausubel’s writing is as precise as it is beautiful, and the haunting details of her work burn the characters and their many nuances and personalities into the reader’s mind. Readers live and love with this lost village, and are invited to endure their hardships and share their joy on every page.
Ausubel’s debut novel is a powerhouse of lyricism and prose. Amid a sea of holocaust novels (The Reader, The Book Thief, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, etc.), hers shines as something out of the ordinary, something magical. No One is Here Except All of Us is a tribute to all of the victims of the second World War. In the same way, it is a tribute to modern literature, a work of true craft, and a fun and exhilarating read.
