The more he looks at her though, the more something seems terribly wrong… No Time to Rest with The Huntressįor the most part, historical fiction novels have a tendency to be fairly slow and descriptive in their nature, if only for the need to establish proper context for the sake of the audience. He is only rejoiced when one day his widowed father returns home with a new fiancee, a soft-spoken German widow. Finally, the third narrative presents us with the seventeen-year-old Jordan McBride, with aspirations to one day become a photographer. However, the investigator sees an opportunity to perhaps bring to a close this unfinished business by joining forces with the only victim to have escaped the Huntress’ claws: Nina Makarova. The second narrative introduces us to Ian Graham, a British war correspondent and Nazi Hunter… with only one target to have truly eluded him: the Huntress. The Huntress, with an already lethal reputation back then, is hot on her trail, and only a miracle can keep Nina alive.

The first narrative takes us during the time of the war, where Night Witch Nina Makarova crashes behind enemy lines and becomes stranded. The Huntress is a three-pronged novel, presenting us with a triple narrative where the events take place over the course of many decades, all of them relating to the titular character, a Nazi war criminal of legendary proportions. How much of it is fact and how much is fiction? Kate Quinn answers this question in detail in her author’s note, but I think her ability to blur the line between the end of reality and the start of fiction proves valuable on numerous occasions. In her novel, Kate Quinn decided to turn her attention to a special element, one of the long-lasting remnants of evil from what war: Nazis in hiding.īefore moving on further, I’d just like to note I’ve seen many people asking: “Is The Huntress based on a true story?” The short answer is that it is based on a composite of the lives of two real women, Hermine Braunsteiner (a female camp guard) and Erna Petri (an SS officer’s wife).

Such an unimaginably large event has countless facets to explore and I’m rather confident we’ll keep seeing more of them brought to light in the coming decades, if of course the Third World War doesn’t happen by then. We are fast approaching the century-mark since the end of the Second World War, but it still fuels our thoughts and imaginations as powerfully as ever, giving way to works such as The Huntress by Kate Quinn.

Kate quinn the huntress