One of The Millions’ Most Anticipated 2025 Books
One of the Los Angeles Times‘ 30 Must-Read Books for Summer
One of the Boston Globe‘s Best Summer 2025 Books
One of People‘s Best Books of June 2025
One of Foreign Policy’s “Novels We’re Reading in June”
One of Zibby Owens’ Summer Reads Pick
“An ambitious, stirring debut.” —People
“Clark grapples with history, latching onto inspiration from her grandfather’s World War II scrapbook. This intense story explores first love between American and German university students who must uncover and reconcile the past to forge a future” —Boston Globe
“Clark uses her first novel to explore a highly literary and highly troubled relationship. [The Scrapbook] is at once a rich historical novel and a philosophical study of how much influence past generations have on our affections.” —Los Angeles Times
“Immersive. . . Clark is interrogating whether past misdeeds implicate future generations—and whether they should.” —The Washington Post
“Heather Clark writes with a rare empathy. . . . In her elegant, calmly unsettling debut novel, Clark illustrates how the cold shadow of German history bleeds constantly into the present, even in the most intimate spheres. . . . The Scrapbook is ostensibly a love story, or, rather, a story of transatlantic obsession. It is also an ethical meditation on memory, complicity and the psychological tremors that can affect our lives decades after the events that prompted them—events that we might not even have been alive to experience.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Phenomenal. . . a unique blend of literary and historical fiction as well as a penetrating exploration of philosophy, art, historical responsibility and guilt in the context of war. . . . The Scrapbook is worthy of reading and rereading as Clark serves up romance, history and political philosophy in ways that could hardly be more relevant.” —BookPage (starred review)
“The Scrapbook is an incredibly smart novel, with an intricate and perfectly paced depiction of a delicate and intense relationship. It’s as if a Sally Rooney novel merged with Richard Linklater’s film, Before Sunrise, with forays into history and humanity further deepening the experience.” —BookList
“The Scrapbook crackles with the intensity of meeting one’s intellectual match — the debates, the discovery, and, of course, the books. . . . Sentence by sentence, Clark builds Anna and Cristoph’s dynamic — sexy, slightly masochistic, and always propulsive. Her reserved, elegant prose nails the rending, intoxicating nausea of first love without being cloying. To fall in love is to shift from youthful naïveté toward adulthood’s cloudier complications. Clark treats this rite as a cerebral experience as much as it is physical.” —Jewish Book Council
“[The Scrapbook] offer[s] a flying tour of literary representations of the Holocaust and its legacy—a lightly annotated reading list that includes fiction writers such as Tadeusz Borowski and W. G. Sebald—as well as a meditation on the cost of political crimes to a nation’s trustworthiness and honor, even generations later.” —New York Times
“The Scrapbook weaves a fictional tale of first love, family, and historical memory from a real-life World War II scrapbook.” —Foreign Policy
“Clark’s first novel combines historical fiction with a thoughtful examination of a classic rite of passage for many young adults: falling in unrequited love. . . . Clark deftly interweaves Anna and Christoph’s interactions with glimpses of their grandfathers’ lives during the war, adding depth to the story. . . . Clark is at her best.” —Library Journal
“The Pulitzer finalist enthralls in The Scrapbook, her passionate and perceptive first novel.” —Publishers Weekly (cover and starred review)
“Heather Clark’s The Scrapbook is a masterpiece. This beautifully crafted, quietly devastating love story reminds us of the epic impact of the Second World War across continents and through generations, its scars perhaps most poignantly felt in the intimate interactions between two solitary people.” —Rebecca Donner, New York Times bestselling author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days
“Through an exquisitely observed love affair, Clark explores how the Nazis’ lingering legacy can still haunt the lives of those born long after the war. A stunningly good novel.” —Julia Boyd, Sunday Times bestselling author of A Village in the Third Reich
“Ingeborg Bachmann once asked, ‘When will the war be over?’ The Scrapbook offers an answer to this timeless question in a work of searing tenderness. An intimate portrait of youthful romance, it meticulously captures the melancholy inheritance of a generation trying to find their place amidst the rubble of the past. Clark reminds us that we’re never as far from history as we’d like to imagine and just how much we must give up in order to move on. A stunning quiet work you won’t be able to put down.” —Samantha Rose Hill, author of Hannah Arendt and What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt
“Historical fiction strikes a complicated balance, between a need to recreate with some accuracy events in the past while at the same time communicating the relevance of those facts to the present. Heather Clark situates a contemporary love story in the shadow of—and with capacious insight into—German history both during and immediately after the Second World War. Clark navigates difficult conceptual ground with remarkable ease, making the complex legacy of the war appreciable to readers in the present.” —Matthew Longo, author of The Picnic
“An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love. With a biographer’s eye for detail and a novelist’s grasp of human frailty, The Scrapbook traces the fault lines between past and present, between nations and individuals, revealing how history lingers—not in grand narratives, but in intimate entanglements.” —Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots
“A swiftly-moving, molecularly perceptive, singular portrait of intoxicating young love. Clark captures the psychological nuances and emotional currents of two youthful intellects wrestling with the weight of history and questions of legacy, moral responsibility, and the blinders and dissonance of a complicated romance.” —Aube Rey Lescure, author of River East, River West
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