What is Sharon Potts reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Sharon Potts, author of The Other Traitor.

Her entry begins:

I occasionally joke that there’s more truth in fiction than in newspapers and history books. Which is why I love reading novels, particularly historical fiction that presents an unconventional view of people we’ve been raised to see only in black-and-white. But are they really simply villains or heroes as we’ve been taught to believe?

Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See is set in France during World War II, and much of it takes place in the walled port city of Saint-Malo. Doerr does a remarkable job of portraying a young German soldier in a nuanced and sympathetic manner. Werner is caught in the midst of a devastating war machine. He is part of a small group of German soldiers whose job is to...[read on]

About The Other Traitor, from the publisher:

It’s been over sixty years, but three people remain haunted by what he did.

Was it treason…or something far worse?

Raised with shame and silence, Annette Revoir refuses to confront her terrible legacy—her grandfather’s execution as an atomic bomb spy in the 1950s. But when she finds an old family photo album that reveals a very different portrait of her grandfather, her instincts as a journalist take over. Her inquiries put her on a collision course with a young man and his grandmother, but Annette is prepared to go to any lengths to prove her disgraced grandfather’s innocence.

Everything in Julian Sandman’s life is wrong—his unrewarding career at a big drug company, his expensive Manhattan apartment, and his self-indulgent girlfriend. The worst part of living a lie is the one he’s been telling himself. Julian is ready to defy the demons of his family’s past… Perhaps he should have first considered the cost.

Mariasha Lowe’s childhood growing up in Brooklyn during the Great Depression is safely preserved in her strange metal sculptures. Today, people might say she was ‘a red-diaper baby’ but they’d be mistaken about her brushes with communism. And with Yitzy. Mariasha is ninety-five, but she’s never forgotten him. Is it finally time to face her past so she can make a future for Annette and Julian? Or will she take her secrets to the grave?

Learn more about the book and author at Sharon Potts' website.

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--Marshal Zeringue