Reviews
(extract from review in The Guardian 31.1.09)
" ...this absorbing read is both well researched and plushly written."
Caroline Miller, The Guardian, 31 January 2009
(extract from review in The New York Times 14.09.08)
“Deftly captur[es] the era’s sense of frenzied invention and seductive promise. Born on New Year’s Eve in 1899, Lilly is the incarnation of this toxic mix of glitter and despair. Over the course of nearly half a century, as troops parade through Berlin and bread lines erupt into riots, she is transformed, almost accidentally, from Tiny Lil, the unwanted baby, to Lidi, one of Germany’s most celebrated film stars. … Colin…writes with a supple, whimsical charm. “The Glimmer Palace” [is] absorbing in its…authenticity "
Mike Peed, The New York Times, 14 September 2008
(extract from review in The Gloss Magazine, September 2008)
"...Intricately plotted and filled with memorable characters, Beatrice Colin's gorgeously written debut novel is a lush delight that perfectly captures the spirit of Berlin, " a city with an appetite for energy, for thrill, for sex. How could it fail to move you?" The same could be said for Lilly and for this compelling novel."
Anna Carey, The Gloss Magazine, September 2008
"Post-1900 Berlin saw the vibrant, industrialised metropolis spiral from Weimar decadence into post-way austerity, which gave rise to the violence and threat of National Socialism. This turbulent political era serves as a rich backdrop to the story of Lilly, an urchin born into scandal who became a glamorous silent movie star fated to be cloaked in tragedy. A transfixing concerto of intrigue, passion, desperation, intrigue, love, heroism and tragedy."
Easy Living, October 2008
(extract from review in The Sunday Herald 24.08.08)
"(An) exceptional novel . . . the narration is curt, precise and touched with irony. . . In Lilly, Colin has created a heroine who is so full of beauty and bad luck that one wonders whether to envy or pity her. Yet there is something quite charming about a girl who acts only with her eyes, and the curiosity about Lilly Nelly Aphrodite only gets stronger as the novel progresses. "
Theresa Munoz, The Sunday Herald, 24 August 2008
(extract from review in The Herald 23.08.08)
"...Colin makes her heroine very real, eschewing any messing around with shallow post-modernist irony. Lilly's life faithfully reflects 20th-century European history and, in some ways, is more of a war epic - taking in both the first and second world wars and the tragedy of Germany between them. The title mistakenly suggests yet another hyper-romantic novel but instead Lilly Aphrodite is utterly believable, hard-nosed, and moving.
The child of a cabaret performer and Jewish playboy aristo, Lilly is orphaned, her childhood destroyed by a succession of Catholic institutions. She has to learn to live on the streets, and deal with the catastrophes of war, poverty and prostitution. She does so, however, in a Germany which is at the cutting edge of the newest art form - film. The movies are both Lilly's salvation and, under Goebbels, her nemesis.
A large-canvas novel by a Scottish writer is always welcome; even more so a first-time novelist's readiness to play with form and structure. The central narrative is satisfyingly simple - the linear story of an extraordinary life. But Colin has developed a neat trick with perspective. She zooms her lens out and sees into the future of secondary characters' lives, so that we know what will ultimately happen to everyone in the novel. It is done so naturally and without fuss that we barely notice it, but gives her story a sense of epic and destiny.
...This work is bold, solid and clever. The inspiration for Lilly came from Colin's great aunt, a Russian émigrée to Berlin who worked for Alexander Korda. But the writing is such that we can expect much more from Colin should she run out of family legends."
Chris Dolan, The Herald, 23 August 2008
"The storytelling is masterful and the language magical. "
Joan McAlpine, Sunday Times, 3 August 2008
Read the full review in timesonline
"This is a big, plush velvet cushion of a book, dense with historical detail and already picking up comparisons to Sarah Waters’ weighty, sexy epics. It’s the story of Lilly Aphrodite, an orphan turned silent movie star, whose trajectory mirrors Germany’s freefall from warring, empire-building superpower, through the Depression and seduction by Nazism, between 1900 and 1936. Lilly’s journey takes in serving jobs, seedy strip clubs, and the extreme, bloody poverty of the interwar years. Each chapter starts off with a vignette tracing the importance of the newly-developing cinematic art form to Germany’s constitutional and political pulse; like an audience in a movie theatre we watch saucy peep shows, faked news reports from the Front, the high art of German Expressionism, and Leni Riefenstahl’s beautifully-shot Nazi propaganda.
In this way, Lilly the beggar girl, typist and movie star becomes a lens to view a whole country and the glorious, downtrodden mass of its people. She herself has little more substance than the lovely flickering images of her on the screen, but she illuminates the glittering, compelling characters around her: rich, deceitful Eva, racketing round Berlin’s gay clubs, brutal mercenary Kurt and his lover, the hard-bitten former child prostitute Hanne. Colin’s omniscient narration recalls Muriel Spark at her sharpest and pokes into the futures of even the least significant supporting character, following them into trenches, concentration camps, hopes, regrets and reminiscences."
Kirstin Innes, The List, 31 July 2008 (Issue 608)
"As spell-binding as the era in which it's set, Beatrice Colin's The Glimmer Palace is a rare marriage of muscular scholarship and high romance. In the chiaroscuro of Lilly's coming of age - from orphan to struggling war bride to triumphant and ultimately vulnerable film star - we're given all the flashes of brilliance and deep shadow that defined the birth of an industry and a troubled century."
Sheri Holman, author of The Dress Lodger and The Mammoth Cheese
"Written with intelligence and shimmer, The Glimmer Palace transports the reader to Berlin in the first part of the twentieth century. Colin's heroine, Lilly Aphrodite, is as rich, alive and dangerous as the city she inhabits; and as the novel progresses, Berlin's history becomes her own."
David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl andThe 19th Wife
"There are few characters as beguiling as the incomparable Tiny Lil. And Colin tells her riveting story - and the enthralling story of pre-war Berlin - breathlessly and triumphantly."
Jennifer Gilmore, author of Golden Country
"As moving as it is smart, this tough-minded extravaganza had me from page one. The Glimmer Palace is a dazzling tale of survival in the urban wilderness."
Emma Donoghue, author of Slammerkin and Life Mask