My version: Hardback
Genre: Historical Fiction, The Holocaust
Publisher: Riverrun
First published: 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78648-867-1
Pages: 436
Bought, signed
From the cover:
Of everyone in her complicated family, Eva was closest to her grandfather: a charismatic painter – and a keeper of secrets. So when he dies, she’s hit by a greater lkoss – of the questions he never answered, and the past he never shared.
It’s then she finds the letter from the Jewish Museum in Berlin. They have uncovered the testimony he gave after his forced labour service in Hungary, which took him to the death camps and then to England as a refugee. This is how he survived.
But there is a deeper story that Eva will unravel – of how her grandfather learned to live afterwards. As she confronts the lies that have haunted her family, their identity shifts and her own takes shape. The testament is in her hands.
Kim Sherwood’s debut novel, Testament, is an beautifully crafted and deeply moving exploration of grief, hidden histories, and the enduring shadows of the Holocaust. The story centers on Eva, a young woman mourning the death of her beloved grandfather, Joseph Silk, a charismatic painter who spent his life guarding the secrets of his past. When Eva discovers a letter from the Jewish Museum in Berlin among his belongings, she is propelled into a profound journey to uncover his true identity as József, a Hungarian Jew who survived forced labor and the death camps alongside his brother László. Sherwood handles this heavy, historical premise with immense sensitivity and breathtaking prose, hooking the reader not just with the tragedy of the past, but with the intensely relatable human desire to truly know the people we love.
What makes Testament truly exceptional is Sherwood’s masterful command of dual narratives, seamlessly weaving József’s harrowing wartime experiences with Eva’s modern-day quest for the truth. Rather than relying solely on the visceral shock of historical atrocities, the novel scales a mountain of repressed emotion, examining how trauma ripples through generations and reshapes family identities. The characterization is flawless; Joseph is portrayed not just as a survivor, but as a complex, deeply flawed man who built a new life in England by burying his agonizing survivor’s guilt under a completely new persona. Through Eva’s unravelling of his life, Sherwood explores the dichotomy between the primal need to preserve history and the desperate, self-protective urge to forget it.
Ultimately, Testament transcends the traditional boundaries of historical fiction to become a profound meditation on empathy, legacy, and the redemptive power of love. Drawing deeply from her own family’s history—Sherwood’s grandmother was a Hungarian Holocaust survivor and her grandfather was the actor George Baker—the author infuses the novel with an impeccable level of research and an authentic, undeniable emotional weight. Despite the agonizing depths of the history it navigates, the book remains a fundamentally hopeful and uplifting read. It is a stunning, beautifully written triumph of a debut that reminds us how the past constantly informs the present. A search for identity. Both who her grandfather was, which will lead to her discovering who she is. Both are ultimately shaped by their past, and the story is in essence them now uncovering and finding out what shape they’re now in. A real pleasure to read, the right side of sentimentality. Very moving and thought-provoking.
Couldn't I Just Tell You 