The Martyrs, the Lovers - Paperback

by Catherine Gammon (Author)

In Catherine Gammon's The Martyrs, The Lovers, Jutta Carroll and her lover Lukas Grimm are found shot to death in their home. Was it a murder-suicide? Was it the work of their political enemies, or possibly someone close to them? From WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, The Martyrs, The Lovers is a novel wrought with the best of mystery, historical, and metafiction. Gammon, wielding prose like a surgical scalpel, peels back the layers of history to explore the forces and motivations--external and psychological--that drive politics, passion, and activism, as well as the counterforces that threaten their progress. By probing all of the possible motives behind Jutta and Lukas's deaths, Gammon tells a tale of individual roles in world politics, considers the role of Western narrative structures, how and why we tell the stories that endure, and the (im)possibility of Truth.

Loosely based on the life and death of the activist and founder of the German Green Party, Petra Kelly, and her partner Gert Bastian, The Martyrs, The Lovers calls attention to the perennial challenges that informed the lives and deaths of these activists; to environment, to peace, to justice, and to feminism, which, if anything, are more prevalent than ever today.

Author Biography

Catherine Gammon is most recently the author of the story collection The Gunman and the Carnival (Baobab Press, 2024). Her fiction has appeared in literary magazines for many years, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Missouri Review, among them. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as from colonies including the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and Djerassi. After growing up in Los Angeles, Catherine lived in Berkeley, and later in Ohio, Iowa, and Massachusetts before moving to New York, where she worked for The New York Review of Books. She left New York to join the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1992 and later returned to California for training and ordination at San Francisco Zen Center's Green Dragon Temple/Green Gulch Farm. She lives in Pittsburgh, with a garden and a cat.