A beautiful and harrowing reflection on memory and accountability, Gestures is a tale of eloquent and tragic force.
The story begins in 1923. A young and inexperienced Foreign Service officer, Jeremy Burnham arrives in the storied and exotic city of Venice to take up his first post. He falls into a friendship with an attractive older woman, Jane Carlyle, who initiates him into Venetian society and introduces him to the enigmatic Eva von Woerden, and the cosmopolitan Jewish art connoisseur Anthony Manet. The destinies of these four characters become enlaced as Venice and Italy fall under the encroaching shadow of fascism. When one of them is brutally murdered, a chain of events is set off that will climax more than twenty years later in the ruins of post-war Amsterdam, when the lessons of courage and moral responsibility implicit in that earlier death are at last made plain. H. S. Bhabra’s stunning novel is a richly wrought narrative of a world caught in the flux of the twentieth century.
